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First paralyzed person to be ‘reanimated’ offers neuroscience insights

Orthopedics and Spine April 26, 2016

A quadriplegic man who has become the first person to be implanted with technology that sends signals from the brain to muscles — allowing him to regain some movement in his right arm hand and wrist — is providing novel insights about how the brain reacts to injury.

Two years ago, 24-year-old Ian Burkhart from Dublin, Ohio, had a microchip implanted in his brain, which facilitates the ‘reanimation’ of his right hand, wrist and fingers when he is wired up to equipment in the laboratory. Researchers led by Chad Bouton, currently at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, have been studying Burkhart ever since, and publish their results on 13 April in Nature¹.

Previous studies have suggested that after spinal-cord injuries, the brain undergoes ‘reorganization’ — a rewiring of its connections. But this new work suggests that the degree of reorganization occurring after such injuries may be less than previously assumed. “It gives us a lot of hope that there are perhaps not as many neural changes in the brain as we might have imagined after an injury like this, and we can bypass damaged areas of the spinal cord to regain movement,” says Bouton. Previously, such a ‘neural bypass’ had been done in monkeys, and brain signals had been decoded in people and used to animate a robotic prosthetic arm, but this is the first time a person has had their own body part reanimated.

Burkhart — who is paralysed from the shoulders down but can move his shoulders and, to a small extent, his elbow — broke his neck after diving into waves during a beach holiday when he was 19. He later discovered that 25 minutes away from his home, researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus were developing the reanimation technology and decided to volunteer to have the microchip implanted.

By: Linda Geddes

AUTHOR - Authorship Credit Noted Above

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