Reversing Paralysis

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Hello everyone,

Have you heard of anyone paralysed able to use organ again, well it is possible now!!

A French neuroscientist was watching a monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal’s spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal’s spinal cord, below the injury. A wireless connection joined the two electronic devices.

The result: a system that could read the monkey’s intention to move and then transmit it in the form of bursts of electrical stimulation to its spine. Soon the monkey’s right leg began to move. Extend and flex. Extend and flex.“The monkey was thinking, and then boom, it was walking”.

They are wirelessly connecting the brain-reading technology directly to electrical stimulators on the body, creating what Courtine calls a “neural bypass” so that people’s thoughts can again move their limbs. 

Just try sitting on your hands for a day. That will give you an idea of the shattering consequences of spinal cord injury. You can’t scratch your nose or tousle a child’s hair. “But if you have this,” says Courtine, reaching for a red espresso cup and raising it to his mouth with an actor’s exaggerated motion, “it changes your life.”

Grégoire Courtine holds the two main parts of the brain-spine interface.

Courtine’s laboratory is located in a vertiginous glass-and-steel building in Geneva that also houses a $100 million center that the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss funded specifically to solve the remaining technical obstacles to neurotechnologies like the spinal cord bypass. It’s hiring experts from medical-device makers and Swiss watch companies and has outfitted clean rooms where gold wires are printed onto rubbery electrodes that can stretch as our bodies do.

A close-up of a brain-reading chip, bristling with electrodes.

Flexible electrodes developed to simulate the spinal cord.

The head of the center is John Donoghue says as complex as they are, and as slow as progress has been, neural bypasses are worth pursuing because patients desire them. “Ask someone if they would like to move their own arm,” he says. “People would prefer to be restored to their everyday self. They want to be reanimated.”

Reference: https://www.technologyreview.com