Start Me Up

A new research center focuses on developing elecetronic replacements for damaged or diseased systems in the body.

by Lori Oliwenstein

 

It sounds like the plot of a 1970s television series: A group of dedicated scientists coming together to develop electrode-studded slivers of silicone that promise to restore sight to the blind, movement to the paralyzed and memory to those who have lost it.

But this is real life. And the scientists working within the newly created USC Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems (BMES) Engineering Research Center (ERC) are poised to fulfill those promises—and more.

The new center, funded by a $17-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by the Keck School of Medicine’s Mark Humayun, M.D., Ph.D., will coordinate groundbreaking programs at USC, Caltech and UC Santa Cruz to develop so-called “biomimetic” devices designed to mimic and replace damaged or diseased systems in the human body. The center will support educational programs designed to help local students at all levels of schooling to prepare for careers in research, and will work with local colleges to develop job-training skills in the high-tech biotechnology industry. And it will develop industry partnerships that will encourage the transfer of these technologies to the marketplace.

“The Engineering Research Center programs advance knowledge and develop new technologies to transform U.S. industry,” says John Brighton, assistant director for engineering at the NSF. “The centers foster collaboration among researchers from many disciplines and provide an educational and research environment that prepares a new generation of engineering leaders.”

The BMES, its participants say, will move the Los Angeles region to the forefront of the biotechnology industry. USC is one of only four universities in the country—and the only one in California—to have two of these coveted ERCs operating concurrently. The BMES joins the Integrated Media Systems Center ERC, established at the USC School of Engineering in 1996.

“The work of this center will extend the microelectronics revolution in medicine—which includes the pacemaker and the cochlear implant—to the realm of the central nervous system,” says Humayun, professor of ophthalmology and biomedical engineering. “We’re going to implant into people devices that will communicate with tissue and treat incurable diseases such as blindness, paralysis and memory loss.”

The benefits, however, go beyond the individual. “We believe the BMES is going to provide a significant boost to Southern California’s biomedical industry,” says C.L. Max Nikias, Ph.D., dean of the USC School of Engineering.

Nikias will jointly head the center’s executive board with Stephen J. Ryan, M.D., dean of the Keck School and USC senior vice president for medical care.

“The Keck School of Medicine has long had a desire for close collaboration with the School of Engineering,” Ryan says. “As deans, we can facilitate, but what really counts is having leading faculty who want to actively collaborate.”

And it is indeed a collaboration. Humayun is directing the center. Gerald Loeb, M.D., professor of biomedical engineering at the USC School of Engineering, will be the center’s deputy director. Roberta Diaz Brinton, Ph.D., professor of molecular pharmacology and toxicology at the USC School of Pharmacy, will direct the program’s education and outreach component to Los Angeles-area schools and colleges.

The BMES research mission will be fulfilled through continued testbeds—as they are called—on three highly promising microelectronic prostheses. Humayun and his team, co-led by James Weiland, M.D., assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Keck School, will carry on with their research into the intraocular retinal prosthesis that Humayun co-created. The prosthesis works by taking over the job of cells damaged by degenerative eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. An incoming image stimulates electrodes in the device, and they, in turn, stimulate the patient’s remaining retinal cells. The information travels via the optic nerve to the vision centers of the brain to create a representation of the image. The device already has provided a semblance of sight to three patients in early-stage clinical trials.

The second testbed is the neuromuscular prosthesis. Loeb, a physician who helped develop the cochlear implant, is now conducting clinical trials of the BION™, an injectable neuromuscular stimulator that his lab created. The BION reanimates paralyzed muscles through electrical stimulation. During the past three years, Loeb has injected 32 BIONs into the paralyzed muscles of about 20 patients in the U.S., Canada and Italy to treat disorders ranging from stroke to arthritis.

Theodore Berger, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and director of the School of Engineering’s Center for Neural Engineering, leads the third of the testbeds. Berger heads a project to create a silicon chip implant that would take over the function of neurons lost to disease or injury.

His team is mathematically modeling the electrical signals given off by neurons in the hippocampus—a cashew-shaped portion of the brain that plays a crucial role in learning and memory—and designing chips to mimic the functions of those neurons. The team has made chips that could replace about 20 neurons and is designing devices that would fill in for up to 10,000 neurons.

Berger is still some distance from implanting one of his chips in a human, but the idea of doing so is not nearly as remote as it once seemed.

“The work being done at the new ERC will blend engineering and medicine and, by doing so, we will build the next generation of these devices and provide solutions to debilitating medical conditions,” Humayun says. n