Neurological conditions like stroke and spinal cord injury can cause devastating effects to the life of the individuals and their loved ones, limiting their mobility and independence. In most of these conditions, the problem is not related to the muscles or distal nerves, but somewhere along the path from the motor cortex to the spinal cord. To restore motor function, we will integrate bionic interfaces into a comprehensive platform for functional treatment: a scaffold for spinal cord repair, artificial proprioception from minimally-invasive muscle sensing, synthetic spinal cord computation, human-safe optogenetic expression of peripheral nerve opsins, and a muscle-control interface to enable computer-modulated optogenetic muscle stimulation.
This platform technology will be advanced and tested for efficacy in preclinical studies using rodent and swine spinal cord injury models. Using a rat model, following corticografting of autologous neuromuscular grafts, a bio-scaffold will be overlaid to improve axonal regenerative kinetics, promote tissue restoration, and record and stimulate the graft. Employing a pig spinal cord injury model, closed-loop optogenetic muscle sitmulation will be conducted to demonstrate an increased performance and reduced muscle fatigue as compared to conventional methods that employ electrical stimulation. Lastly, using a mouse model, several protein and immune engineering strategies will be tested to demonstrate sustained expression of microbial opsins in the peripheral nervous system.