Blinking Prosthetics and a Better Robocop: Neural Interfacing Tech Is Booming

Lawrence DeGeest attended the 2012 Society for Neuroscience Conference for Motherboard. Read his previous dispatches here.

Perhaps it is the onset of delirium caused by trying to properly report a 30,000 attendee conference while also (and no less properly) reporting the colorful after-hours of New Orleans, but after a few days at SfN 2012 I have acquired the impression that this huge mass of brain scientists, when focused and sober, is capable of all sorts of wonder on which an apprentice science fiction author would feast. None of the press so far seem to harbor ambitions for literature, but if you had to bet a grant on who secretly does, bet on the absent freelancer – we will leave him unnamed – who carries around the convention center a fresh mint julep and feeds the mint leaves to the mouse saved from a laboratory that rides sentry on his shoulder.

There are plenty of hot topics to choose from, but his first book would probably be about neural optogenetics. A combination of optical and genetic research methods, optogenetics involves shooting lasers into particular brain tissue to inhibit or disinhibit its operative cells. Since its breakthrough about two years ago, the method has advanced to the point where researchers now talk about perfecting it and applying it. It’s fascinating tech, but does it amount to mind control, as some YouTube commenters might have you think? Not exactly.

So while it might make for an excellent sci-fi story by our julep-drinking maybe-author — conveniently, there was a poster at this year’s conference devoted to optogenetic research on mice and how it has explored neural circuitry forming the mammalian brain — the reality is far less fantastic. The fastest way you will have mind control in your life is by reading fiction.

The point here is that the results of science trickle slowly from the laboratory into the world. Even when optogenetics is perfected and its best applications defined, there will still miles of red tape from organizations like the FDA until it can actually be use to, for example, help people with brain disorders. Partly it’s because without proper vetting of the techniques, there will be hell to pay if something goes wrong. The rest involves how to sell, and how to manage the technology. This is always true for devices made to treat medical conditions, and don’t forget we are talking about putting things into your brain to change how it (and by extension you) operates.

Let us consider a specific example.

Daniel McDonnall, PhD and director of research at neurotechnology firm Ripple, stood for a few hours one afternoon at his poster presenting a bit of biomedical engineering he has been working on for seven years: an implantable blinking prosthesis.

“There are two blinking muscles in your eye,” McDonnall explained to me. “The ambicularis oculi keeps it open, and the lemtor pelpebrae keeps it closed. There are about three thousand patients every year whose closing muscle does not function.”

The main cause of such unilateral facial paralysis is damage to the 7th cranial nerve, which controls the closing muscle. Facial trauma, tumor resection, and about one percent of Bell’s Palsy cases are behind the nerve damage. The consequences of being unable to blink in one eye are significant. The unprotected eye desiccates, increasing risk of infection. In some cases, patients become depressed, often solely from frustration with dealing with the condition. (Seriously, imagine you couldn’t blink. It would be terrible.) Milder cases still cause great discomfort.

“Think back to any staring contest you’ve had,” McDonnall said. “That’s the rest of your life.”

For awhile the most common treatment, according to McDonnall, was a small gold bar placed in the eyelid to weigh it down. McDonnall’s prosthesis, by contrast, dynamically restores blinking in the unhealthy eye by recording blinks in the healthy eye and sending signals to the implanted stimulator which blinks the unhealthy eye. As a result, the two eyes blink simultaneously.

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That is how it is supposed to work anyway. Only canines, which have similar eyelid size and blinking pattern of humans, have tested the prototype. There is a huge approval bottleneck before it reaches humans.

“For one, we are using electronics, and two, we are implanting something in the body long-term,” said McDonnall. “The FDA has no evaluation for something like this. We have to invent the tests.”

Such unilateral facial paralysis has been known for about thirty-five years, he added, but because the patient population is small, it has not received priority. This is another contributor to the bottleneck, and often a sad reality of medical development: It’s hard to make money when only a few people would ever buy your device, especially when research and testing costs are extremely high. McDonnall’s research is funded by the National Eye Institute, which suggests growing concern with the condition. But he does not expect swift approval of his blinking prosthesis.

“Many years from now,” he said. “Many years.”

Sadly, I never saw the mouse guy again after the conference started. Maybe he started writing his sci-fi opus. Either way, he certainly has competition. I’m not sure if there’s an award from the Society of Neuroscience for best satire, but I will go ahead and give it to neuroscientists Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek, representatives of Guerrilla Science, for their poster “Advances in Neuroprosthetics for Detroit Law Enforcement: Building a better RoboCop today.” Brain computer interfacing (BCI) was science fiction in 1987 when the first robocop was invented. Now it is a promising field, which the authors sampled to develop the second and improved robocop. Its kill ratio is higher, it runs on Mac OS X, and it only cost $30, the cost of printing the poster. Yeah, it’s pretty awesome (PDF).

Neural interfacing is obviously a huge topic, one made even more so when you’re at the world’s largest neuroscience conference. But it’s also a discipline that highlights the state of brain research today. Like much of neuroscience, and medical research in general, researchers are pushing further and further into the realm of science fiction. And while talking about ‘mind control’ makes for good headlines, the reality is a balance between positive developments for patients and a whole lot of red tape.