A team of researchers, led by Group Leader Dr Nir Grossman, UK DRI at Imperial College London, have been awarded a Transformative Healthcare Technologies Award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). These funds will help with development and testing of non-invasive electrical deep brain stimulation technology, a potentially new and innovative way to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Deep brain regions, such as the hippocampus, are affected during the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease, causing bioenergetic and metabolic dysfunction in the neurons. Dr Grossman aims to improve the function of these cells using a type of brain stimulation called temporal interference. Unlike other methods of deep brain stimulation, which require electrodes to be inserted into the brain, temporal interference stimulation is non-invasive. It works by applying two electric fields of slightly different frequencies to the brain from electrodes attached to the scalp. The electric fields can be directed so that they overlap at a particular region, such as the hippocampus, and the fluctuations of the combined currents are able to stimulate the neurons there.
The EPSRC Transformative Healthcare Technologies Award will allow Dr Grossman to further develop the technology behind temporal interference and test its therapeutic potential in animal models. The team will begin by manufacturing specialist hardware to increase efficiency of the electrical fields required before applying the technology to the hippocampus of a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Before temporal interference is used for preclinical studies, the design of the technology will also be discussed with people living with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as carers and health professionals, to ensure that it is suitable to be worn day-to-day. The award for this first stage of the project is ~£300,000 for 15 months. If successful with this stage, Dr Grossman will receive the second round of funding (~£5 million over 4 years) to establish preclinical evidence of the benefit of temporal interference in people living with Alzheimer’s disease.
