The future of healthcare: electronic brain implants

"Imagine a pharmaceutical company 20 or 30 years from now. Moving beyond conventional drugs that interact biochemically with the body, it will have built a big “bioelectronics” business that treats disease through electrical signalling in the brain and elsewhere.

Neurological problems, from stroke and epilepsy to depression, will be treated through electronic implants into the brain rather than pills or injections. Even diabetes and obesity will be attacked in ways that seem like science fiction today, by sending electrical signals to malfunctioning cells.

That remarkable vision comes from one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical executives, Moncef Slaoui, head of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug company.

“At present every pharmaceutical and biotech company makes chemical or biological molecules that target [biochemical] structures such as proteins in the body,” said Mr Slaoui. “No one is designing medicines to interact with the electrical signals that are the other language of biology.”

With enthusiastic support from Sir Andrew Witty, his chief executive, and other senior colleagues, Mr Slaoui wants GSK to become the first large company to make bioelectronics a central plank of its long-term planning.

“The sciences that underpin bioelectronics are proceeding at an amazing pace at academic centres around the world but it is all happening in separate places,” he says. “The challenge is to integrate the work – in brain-computer interfaces, materials science, nanotechnology, micro-power generation – to provide therapeutic benefit.”

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Today, only a minuscule fraction of the electrical activity in people’s brains can be read by computer. Even so, recent experiments have given spectacular results.

Perhaps the most remarkable was a recent US clinical trial in which tetraplegic patients used their thoughts to direct robotic arms. The research team, led by John Donoghue and Leigh Hochberg at Brown University, released a video of a 58-year-old patient called Cathy, whose mental activity drove a robot to pick up her drinking bottle from a nearby table and move it up to her mouth so that she could sip some coffee. A heartwarming smile illuminated Cathy’s face after she had drunk without help from a human carer for the first time in 15 years.

The BrainGate system developed by the Brown University team has a sensor, about the size of a small aspirin pill, with 100 hair-thin electrodes implanted into the top of the patient’s motor cortex, the brain area that controls movement. It is connected to an external computer, which translates the neural activity into commands to drive a robot.

According to another paralysed patient called Bob, hard thinking is not required: “I just imagined moving my own arm and the [robotic] arm moved where I wanted it to go.”

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Some of the best bioengineers in the US, including John Rogers of the University of Illinois, Brian Litt of the University of Pennsylvania and Jonathan Viventi of New York University, are developing a new generation of soft computer interfaces, made with flexible silicon circuitry that can bend and stretch to match the curves of the brain.

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Although bioelectronics research currently focuses on the brain, its potential extends much wider. “Electrical signalling is not confined to the central nervous system,” says Mr Slaoui. “We could make use of signalling in the peripheral nervous system too.”

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“The beauty of electrical signalling is that it has only a local effect,” says Mr Slaoui. In contrast, even a well- targeted drug drenches the whole body in unwanted chemical."

(small percentage of article excerpted under statutory fair use, 17 USC 107.)