NSF Award
1117601
This project represents an ongoing collaboration between teams at two institutions. As people live longer, blindness caused by degenerative diseases of the retina such as macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa is today a major disability among the aging in the developed world. These types of "neural" blindness cannot currently be medically treated in any satisfactory manner. There is now compelling experimental evidence in humans that even when such diseases cause a loss of photoreceptors (i.e., rod and cone cells in the retina), electrical stimulation of the remaining retinal neurons that survive this loss can be used to bypass the damaged tissue and deliver visual information to the brain. This is essentially the same concept that supported the development of the cochlear prosthesis, which has been a fabulous success, restoring hearing to many tens of thousands of deaf patients. The PIs and their respective teams have been working for over 20 years toward the goal of developing a retinal prosthesis to restore truly useful vision to patients in an analogous manner. With prior funding from a number of agencies including NSF, they have created enabling technology for a miniaturized high-density implantable wirelessly-driven neuro-prosthesis package with over 200 individually-addressable channels, which is over three times the inputs and outputs in any current commercially available neurostimulator. The field's ability to create complex integrated circuitry for neurostimulation and/or recording has outpaced the development of long-term implantable packaging, microelectrode array, and assembly technology. If optimized, those technologies would make possible new devices that interface with hundreds of neural tissue sites simultaneously. This is the PI's aim in the current project. The funding will complement existing grants to the PIs and their collaborators, and will allow them to complete development of a new 200+ channel co-fired ceramic signal feed-through disc, to optimize the micro-fabrication process for high-density microelectrode arrays that interface with neural tissue, and to improve the bonding and interconnection processes required to assemble the implant package. <br/><br/>Broader Impacts: The 200+ channel wirelessly-driven implant that will constitute the primary project outcome will have over three times the number of individually-addressable stimulating electrodes now available from any group. This funding will further allow the PI to ready devices for later pre-clinical testing (with anticipated follow-on support from the VA). Project results will be widely disseminated in publications, and by distributing sample devices within the rehabilitation R&D community. The device which is the focus of this project will also be useful in a myriad other future chronically implantable prosthetics, palliative devices, and human-computer interface devices.
