Ultrasound Enables 'Deep-Brain' Treatment, Without the Implant

The treatment known as deep brain stimulation requires the implantation of a surgical device to treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. A team at Washington University in St. Louis has a new method of brain stimulation that does not call for an implant  . Instead, the team uses focused ultrasound to turn specific types of neurons in the brain on and off, enabling precise control of motor activity without surgical device implantation.

The team, led by Hong Chen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of radiation oncology at the School of Medicine, is the first to provide this kind of "sonothermogenetics."

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] imagine being able to non-invasively and precisely control your brain by turning on and off your neural activity you could treat brain disorders that affect billions of people around the world like parkinson's disease and depression there is a new technique that might

00:00:19 someday deliver just that this technique is called sono thermogenetic it is a method for controlling specific types of neurons using ultrasound ultrasound can penetrate through the human skull to target any brain regions with millimeter spatial resolution they

00:00:37 developed a viral construct that can deliver these thermosensitive ion channels into selected neurons these genetically selected neurons express the ion channels on the cell membrane a few seconds of ultrasound sonication safely warms up the neurons and opens the expressed thermosensitive

00:00:56 ion channels these ion channels function as ultrasound controllable switches that can turn on selected neurons with densely wired brain circuits cyanothermogenetics provides a new tool for non-invasive cell type specific neuromodulation in the whole brain