President Obama highlighted a $78.9 million BRAIN Initiative project to improve service members' and veterans' health through the development of nano-scale electrical implants to modulate nerve signaling and record health biomarkers.
"Instead of relying only on medication, we envision a closed-loop system that would work in concept like a tiny, intelligent pacemaker. It would continually assess conditions and provide stimulus patterns tailored to help maintain healthy organ function, helping patients get healthy and stay healthy using their body's own systems," said Doug Weber of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), charged with running the ElectRx (pronounced electrics) project.
The devices to be studied will focus on the peripheral nervous system and could yield cures for inflammatory diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic inflammatory response syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease, according to DARPA. Brain and mental health disorders like depression could be targeted too.
In fact devices with peripheral indications, such as peripheral vasculature disease, are a growing focus of the medical device giants. Last week Covidien ($COV) announced the acquisition of privately held Reverse Medical, a provider of vascular devices, for an undisclosed sum. And Boston Scientific ($BSX) also bulked up in the vascular devices arena this year with its purchase of Bayer's devices for $415 million.
DARPA is in charge of a number of programs to support the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative including the $40 million Restoring Active Memory initiative focused on neural implants.
In an Aug. 26 release on veterans' health timed to coincide with President Obama's address to the American Legion, the White House also announced that it will host a BRAIN Initiative conference in the fall.
- read the release from DARPA
- get the release from the White House