Project description
Reconnecting the brain and spine to restore movement after stroke
Millions of people globally suffer from hand and arm paralysis caused by subcortical strokes, which disrupt communication between the brain’s motor cortex and spinal cord circuits. This condition severely impacts quality of life and imposes a significant socioeconomic burden, yet no effective treatment exists. With this in mind, the EIC-funded ReverseStroke project will develop a revolutionary brain-spine interface. This ‘digital bridge’, consisting of implantable recording and stimulation systems, will reconnect the motor cortex with spinal circuits, enabling functional movement restoration. Promising results from spinal cord injury trials suggest that this technology could reverse paralysis, offering the first viable solution for stroke survivors and paving the way for clinical adoption.
Objective
From violinists to metal welders, finely tuned hand and arm movements are the foundation of craft, while all of us rely on proficient use of hands for the activities of daily life. Yet, more than 25 million people worldwide lost functional movements to subcortical stroke. Subcortical stroke often interrupts the communication between the cortex and the cervical spinal cord circuits, which leads to permanent hand and arm paralysis. The result is a vastly reduced quality of life and enormous socioeconomic burden for the affected, their families, and the society. A treatment that can effectively restore functional movements after subcortical stroke does not yet exist. Still, the motor cortex, which orchestrates movements, and the spinal cord motor circuits that directly control muscles remain largely intact. We aim to reverse the hand and arm paralysis of people with subcortical stroke by developing a digital bridge that reconnects the motor cortex with the cervical spinal motor circuits. This brain-spine interface consists of fully-implantable recording and stimulation systems that link cortical signals to spatiotemporal sequences of epidural electrical stimulation targeting spinal cord regions involved in the production of hand and arm movements. Our preliminary results in people with spinal cord injury strongly indicate that the brain-spine interface can restore natural control of movement and promote neurological recovery. Therefore, we are confident that a cervical brain-spine interface can reverse hand and arm paralysis incurred by stroke and, therefore, become the first viable treatment option for subcortical stroke survivors. Beyond the development and validation of the cervical brain-spine interface for stroke survivors, this project will build the intellectual property necessary to secure funding that will bring this treatment into widespread clinical use.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2024-PATHFINDEROPEN-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
5656 AE Eindhoven
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.