Personalized Epidural Electrical Stimulation of The Lumbar Spinal Cord for Clinically Applicable Therapy to Restore Mobility After Paralyzing Spinal Cord Injury

Personalized Epidural Electrical Stimulation of The Lumbar Spinal Cord for Clinically Applicable Therapy to Restore Mobility After Paralyzing Spinal Cord Injury

IT’IS is proud to be a partner on the project – Personalized Epidural Electrical Stimulation of The Lumbar Spinal Cord for Clinically Applicable Therapy to Restore Mobility After Paralyzing Spinal Cord Injury – with funding from the Personalized Health and Related Technologies (PHRT) strategic focus area of the ETH Domain.

The project, which leverages results from two successful Eurostars projects, RESTORE and PREP2GO, is lead by Prof. Grégoire Courtine of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Other partners on the project are the Computer Vision Laboratory (Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering) of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich), the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC), the Neurosurgery Department of the University Hospital of Lausanne (CHUV), and ONWARD Medical, SA.

In the previous two projects, spatiotemporal epidural electrical stimulation (EES) of the lumbar spinal cord applied during neurorehabilitation was shown to restore walking in 9 individuals with chronic spinal cord injury under the framework of the STIMO clinical trial. The STIMO therapy is based on an implanted stimulator connected to a 16-electrode paddle lead surgically inserted in the dorsal epidural space above the lumbar spinal cord to deliver EES directly to the spinal cord dura to recruit axons within the dorsal roots that project to motor neurons. The activated motor neurons contract the muscles to generate leg mobility and restore walking. The goals of the PHRT-funded project are to apply recent technological advancements to enhance STIMO therapy by personalizing the selection of the best available lead, the placement of the selected lead, and the EES protocol to enable the most effective restoration of lower-limb mobility.