Event Date
DAVID BORTON, PHD
Associate Professor of Engineering and Brain Science, Brown University
Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Department of Neurosurgery, Rhode Island Hospital
Biomedical Engineer, Providence VA Medical Center
Host: Carolynn Patten, PT, PhD, cpatten@ucdavis.edu
This is an in-person event. Please register at this link or QR code below.
Registration for remote attendance is limited to colleagues from the Sacramento campus and those working remotely: https://tinyurl.com/NeuroengApril24
Abstract
The spinal cord is a superhighway of information flowing to and from the brain and periphery. Unfortunately, in injury this bidirectional flow is disrupted, often leading to permanent impairment of sensorimotor function. Recently, epidural electrical stimulation (EES) below a lesion has been shown to support restoration of voluntary movement, improvement in autonomic function, and initiation of locomotion following chronic spinal cord injury (SCI). Unfortunately, sensation below the SCI remains impaired. My laboratory is investigating the creation of an “electronic bridge” that can restore the flow of information between the periphery and the brain. To that end, we have pursued a first-in-human study demonstrating simultaneous lower extremity motor activation and somatosensory feedback enabled by perilesional EES in participants with sensory and motor complete SCI. We incorporated modern deep learning methodologies to establish stable stimulation parameters for target motor actions and sensory percepts. With an eventual goal to have such systems be utilized at home by future patients, we developed a tablet-based software program for participant-directed control of stimulation parameters. In this lecture, I will discuss the spinal interface technologies our team has been developing through the support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), as well as the results from our early clinical studies. Further, I will argue for the use of the technology as a research platform to explore, e.g. spinal health more generally. I will end with a discussion of the challenges to reaching a take-home therapeutic solution for people with SCI.
Bio
David Borton is an Associate Professor of Engineering and Brain Science at Brown University and a Biomedical Engineer at the Providence VA Medical Center’s Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN). He has a secondary appointment as Associate Professor of Neurosurgery in the Department of Neurosurgery at Rhode Island Hospital. He received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in 2012, and performed a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship at the Ecole Polytechnique Fèdèrale de Lausanne from 2012 to 2014. Prof. Borton leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers focused on the design, development, and deployment of novel neural recording and stimulation technologies. Prof. Borton's team leverages engineering principles to untangle the underpinnings of sensorimotor and neuropsychiatric disease and injury. In 2015, Prof. Borton was awarded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for his work on spinal cord electrical stimulation restoring sensory perception, which was expanded in 2017 by both DARPA and VA Merit awards to continue that effort. He now leads a DARPA program to “bridge the gap” in spinal cord injury through development and integration of innovative neurotechnologies. His work has been featured in Nature, Nature Medicine, Neuron, and Science Translational Medicine, among others and the laboratory is currently supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute for Aging, the Alzheimer’s Disease Foundation, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and industry partnerships.