Ibec Seminar. Dr. Genís Prat Ortega
Neurostimulation to correct neural circuit and motoneuron dysfunction
Dr. Genís Prat Ortega, PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Neurostimulation therapies such as spinal cord stimulation (SCS) or deep brain stimulation have shown unprecedented clinical success in improving voluntary motor control. In this case the stimulation can be understood as a neuroprosthetic because it assists movement but its effect vanishes when turned off. In my presentation, I will show how neurostimulation can be used not only as an assistive neuroprosthetic but also as a therapy to correct neural network dysfunction. Specifically, I will show my postdoctoral work where we used SCS to correct motorneuron dysfunction in Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA). SMA is an inherited neurodegenerative disease causing motoneuron dysfunction, muscle weakness and early mortality. Three therapies can slow disease progression enabling people to survive albeit with lingering motoneuron dysfunction and severe motor impairments. Starting from preclinical evidence showing that motoneuron dysfunction in SMA originates from the loss of excitatory inputs from primary afferents, we hypothesized that artificial augmentation of sensory neural activity with electrical stimulation could compensate for this loss thereby reverting motoneuron function. To test this hypothesis we implanted three adults with SMA with epidural electrodes over the lumbosacral spinal cord to stimulate the sensory axons of the legs. We stimulated participants for 4 weeks 2 hours per day while they executed walking and strength tasks. Remarkably, our neurostimulation regime led to robust improvements in strength, walking and fatigue paralleled by reduced neuronal hyperexcitability and higher motoneuron firing rates. Our data indicates that neurostimulation can reverse a degenerative process of circuit dysfunction thus promoting disease modifying effects in a human neurodegenerative disease. Finally, I will discuss future neurostimulation applications to correct neural network dysfunction.
The Attendance to this seminar will count for the PhD Certificate of Excellence.
