14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators at the Brown University are hard at work in developing new approaches to healing damage caused in the human brain by adverse events such as injuries and stroke. They received a grant to finance their research less than a year ago, and they are already making important progress.
The university received the major share of a nearly $15-million grant, awarded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of their involvement with the REPAIR project.
According to the team, the most important aspect of the study is to understand intricate inner workings of the human brain, so that doctors will know where to act if they want to fix the tremendous damage done by stroke, for example.
Furthermore, having access to this knowledge would enable investigators to develop therapies aimed at fixing these traumatic injuries. Restoring functionality to a patient's limbs, or allowing them to regain access to superior cognitive functions would be an unrivaled achievement all by itself.
Neuroscientists Rebecca Burwell, Barry Connors, John Donoghue, David Sheinberg, and Leigh Hochberg are all part of the Brown team. They are working together to tease out circuitry in the brain that underlies environmental perceptions.
Once they discover all of them, they can easily determine how these areas of the brain formulate a response to what they are perceiving. The researchers will also be able to learn how these cortical regions command the brain to move in response to the environment.
“The ability to help people who are severely disabled or injured in ways that no current medical treatment can cure is the dream,” Brown University professor of engineering Arto Nurmikko explains. The expert is the co-primary investigator of the project.
Research teams at the Stanford University, the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) and University College London (UCL), in the United Kingdom, have also received DARPA funds as part of the REPAIR project.
“If there is an injury that leads to some kind of dysfunction in the brain, do we understand enough so as to substitute the missing part or the broken part with some of the kinds of the control technology we are trying to develop and replace that function?” Sheinberg asks.
“Do we understand how the visual system works well enough so that in the absence of a particular part of the visual system we can deliver signals artificially that might serve as a viable substitute?” he goes on to say. The team will attempt to answer these difficult questions in the coming years.
“There’s an awful lot to be learned. This paradigm of listening to the brain while actually informing the brain [with] methods that have not been available before, will elevate that understanding to a completely new level,” Nurmikko concludes.