“These recommendations will further improve and standardize the care provided to patients with mild TBI [mTBI] and offer them useful information to become more actively involved in their recovery,” Director, Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury Capt. Richard F. Stoltz (USN) said.
In July 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office announced a new TBI program called Restoring Active Memory (RAM), with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Pennsylvania each leading a multidisciplinary team to develop and test wireless, implantable “neuroprosthetics” to help service members, veterans, and others overcome memory deficits resulting from TBI or disease. DARPA also is working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop an implantable neural device for the UCLA-led effort.
Despite the scale of the problem, no effective therapies currently exist to mitigate the long-term consequences of TBI on memory, according to DARPA, and their goal is to use RAM to accelerate development of technologies to address the problem by developing new neuroprosthetics to bridge gaps in the injured brain.
“Ultimately, the decisions made by the brain impact our overall health and also our well-being,” Horoho said. “The brain, through our daily decisions, becomes the gatekeeper of the health and fitness of our bodies.”
“We owe it to our service members to accelerate research that can minimize the long-term impacts of their injuries,” DARPA Program Manager Justin Sanchez, Ph.D., said. “Despite increasingly aggressive prevention efforts, traumatic brain injury remains a serious problem in military and civilian sectors. Through the RAM program, DARPA aims to better understand the underlying neurological basis of memory loss and speed the development of innovative therapies.”
RAM is one of many efforts underway – within the military and VA, as well as civilian medical research and academia – to deal with TBI and PTSD by aggressively pushing the envelope of understanding about one of the most challenging of human mysteries – the brain. DARPA’s plan calls for developing multiscale computational models with high spatial and temporal resolution that describe how neurons code declarative memories – “well-defined parcels of knowledge that can be consciously recalled and described in words, such as events, times and places.”
The program also includes foundational efforts to analyze and decode neural signals to determine how targeted stimulation might help an injured brain re-establish the ability to encode or process new memories. The resulting computational models then will be integrated into new, implantable, closed-loop systems able to deliver targeted neural stimulation, with an aim toward ultimately helping restore memory function.
This rendering shows the next-generation neural device capable of recording and stimulating the human central nervous system being developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The research is funded by DARPA’s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program. Image courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The UCLA team’s effort includes a unique focus on the brain’s entorhinal area, which university researchers previously found could be stimulated to facilitate learning and turning daily experiences into lasting memories. The goal is to develop an advanced, new wireless neuromodulation device, one-tenth the size of existing test items, but with far greater spatial resolution, that ultimately can be implanted into the entorhinal area and hippocampus of TBI patients.
The Pennsylvania team, meanwhile, is focusing on the relationship between memory and complex interactions among widespread regions of the brain. Neurosurgical patients who have had electrodes implanted in multiple areas of their brains as treatment for various neurological conditions, will play computer-based memory games while researchers measure biomarkers of activity patterns stemming from successfully forming new memories and retrieving old ones. The goal is to use the results as models in creating a novel neural stimulation and monitoring system, in partnership with Medtronic, to restore brain memory function.