Program Leader: Steven Schachter, MD

CLINICAL PROBLEM

Neurological diseases are a major cause of suffering and mortality for people of all ages. Affecting one in five Americans at an estimated $400 billion in annual direct costs and lost productivity, neurological diseases will increase in prevalence as the population ages.

Early diagnostic tests and surrogate markers of illness progression in patients with neurological diseases are frequently lacking, current therapies are often palliative rather than curative, and functional restoration is usually inadequate. As significant as this impact is, it is critical to put a face on the disease. Epilepsy, for instance, affects 4 to 6 million Americans. One in three patients continues to have seizures, and despite current therapy, these seizures may be fatal or cause injury and other debilitating symptoms. These patients, often young and in the prime of life, deserve to have a normal life.

SEEKING CLINICAL SOLUTIONS

CIMIT, through its NeuroTechnology Program, is facilitating a unique convergence of specialists and technologies that have hte potential to treat, diagnose and even restore meaningful function for patients with neurological diseases. Under the leadership of Dr. Steven Schachter, a nationally renowned epilepsy expert and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, the CIMIT NeuroTechnology Program was launched to investigate novel solutions to these very complex clinical problems. NeuroTechnology couples the ever-expanding knowledge of neuroscience with the rapidly evolving technology of engineering.

The Program's vision is to dramatically change the standard of care for patients through a merging of neuroscience and technology so that in five years:

• patient quality of life will be dramatically improved,
• neurological disease will be either reversed or ameliorated and
• diagnosis will be possible much sooner in the course of illness than ever before.

The Program purpose is to help give patients a better quality of life.

NEUROTECHNOLOGY PROGRAM

Successfully achieving the vision will require many people working in many teams across several institutions. Through CIMIT and in partnership with the Epilepsy Therapy Development Project (ETDP), the NeuroTechnology Program forms bridges between world class technology partners (MIT, Draper Laboratory and Boston University) and visionary clinicians (neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists and psychiatrists) at the Harvard teaching hospitals and Boston Medical Center.

Working together with leading researchers from around the world, the NeuroTechnology Program has five goals:

Convene

To chart what is known and what is not; to establish clinically relevant paths to explore; to identify critical academic/industry/foundation collaborations and to chart the R&D and funding plan for the program. National meetings are integral to the convening goal.

Educate

To create a site on the internet for dynamic sharing of key learnings through a generous gift from ETDP and matching funds from CIMIT.

Communicate

To inform professional and lay stakeholders alike about progress and the challenges ahead.

Engage

To advance, fund and accelerate solutions through industry, foundations and individuals.

Sponsor

To provide yearly funding for research across all neurological areas. in 2006, almost a half million dollars were awarded to 8 projects (listed below) with 25% of the funds coming from philanthropy. In the 2007 grant cycle, nearly 1 out of every 3 CIMIT grant applications was based on NeuroTechnology.

NEUROTECHNOLOGY PROJECTS FUNDED IN 2006

Principal Investigator	Institution	Project Title
Peter Bergethon, MD	Boston University	A device for imaging the neuroanatomy and transport function of peripheral nerves
Paolo Bonato, PhD	Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital	Development of a marker-less system for clinical analysis of gait abnormalities
Robert H. Brown, MD	Massachusetts General Hospital	Nanoparticles for MRI-based imaging of axonal transport in ALS
Christopher Ducko, MD	Brigham & Women's Hospital	Implementation of a phrenic nerve pacemaker program
Lofti Merabet, MD	Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center	A multi-modal sensory rehabilitative strategy for the augmentation of functional vision
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD	Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center	Modularized, portable, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device
Seward Rutkove, MD	Massachusetts General Hospital	Dynamic imaging and neurointerventions using a high resolution flat-panel volume CT
Steven Schachter, MD	Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center	Monitoring motor patterns of epileptic seizures using wearable sensor technologies: a completely non-invasive method of seizure detection

CIMIT NeuroTechnology Program Leader
Steven Schachter, MD