University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) www.utsouthwestern.edu has joined a consortium of seven universities to develop new technologies to improve memory in people with traumatic brain injury, mild cognitive impairment, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease. The goal is to develop an implantable neural monitoring and stimulation system by the end of 2018 to treat memory loss.
This research effort is part of a national “Restoring Active Memory” (RAM) program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) www.darpa.mil and supported by NIH’s Brain Research through the Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative www.braininitiative.nih.gov. .
The data gathered from the UTSW study will be combined with data from the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Mayo Clinic, Dartmouth University, Emory University, and Boston University to develop and test new treatments.
So far, NIH and other funding sources have allocated more than $240 million to the BRAIN Initiative which is designed to improve understanding of the brain and cognitive function. This will be done by accelerating the development and application of innovative technologies to find new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders.
Researchers plan to use safe levels of electrical stimulation to test new ways to improve brain function and memory in neurosurgery patients who already receive brain stimulation as part of their therapy for epilepsy. Researchers want to determine whether brain stimulation delivered when these individuals play memory games will improve their memory ability.
The researchers think that if memory can be improved in patients who have electrodes implanted to treat epilepsy and who frequently have mild memory impairment, then valuable information will be gained on how to restore memory function in patients with traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer’s disease.
“The national research team believes that the therapeutic strategies being examined in this study will serve as the foundation for novel brain-machine interface devices that will improve memory function,” reports Dr. Bradley Lega, Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery, Neurology, and Neurotherapeutics, and Psychiatry who leads the Dallas arm of the study.