Technology will revolutionize the lives of patients with spinal cord injury

Patients were able to take their first steps within an hour after neurosurgeons had implanted prototypes of a nerve stimulation device remotely controlled by artificial intelligence software. The researchers say that during the next six months, these patients will significantly increase their range of motor activity through nerve stimulation control.

Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne are committed to founding a Dutch technology company called Onward Medical, which is working on commercializing a system that will help paralyzed people regain their mobility. The company plans to start a study involving 70 to 100 patients, mostly in the United States, in about a year. If the early results are confirmed, people immobilized by spinal cord injuries will be able to control and stimulate their nerves and muscles by voice commands or smartwatches.

Other researchers have tried to help paralyzed patients move around by stimulating the nerves in the back of the spine, using the wide electric fields emitted by implanted devices originally designed to control chronic pain, Courtine said. Scientists have redesigned the devices so that the electrical signals reach the spine from the sides, not the back. This approach allows very specific targeting and activation of regions of the spinal cord. They then developed artificial intelligence algorithms that instruct the electrodes on the device to emit stimulating signals, in the correct order, the individual nerves that control the muscles in the torso and legs. The advantage of the device is that its software is adapted to the anatomy of each patient. After implanting the device, patients could immediately activate their legs and walk, said Bloch. The researchers noted that although the patients regained the ability to perform various activities, including controlling their muscles, they did not regain their natural ability to move for long periods. According to Bloch, the more they train, the more chances they have of activating their muscles.

Researchers from Israel, who reported their experiment in the journal Advanced Science, can boast of similar achievements. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have attempted to repair the spinal cord in mice using adult human cells that are designed to behave like embryonic stem cells that can develop into any type of cell in the body. The animals' spinal cords have formed scar tissue. The experts first allowed the stem cells to develop in the special environment of the test tube, and transplanted them into mice only after they had grown into a small network of nerve cells and after the scar tissue had been surgically removed. They estimated the effectiveness in restoring traffic at 80 percent. Human research is expected to begin within a few years.

Source: Reuters