Wireless device effective in deep brain stimulation on patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease
12th February 2019
The increase in muscle rigidity is one of the key symptoms of the Parkinson's disease, which is often treated by implanting deep brain stimulation electrodes when drugs are no longer having any effect. During surgery, doctors evaluate the rigidity of the wrist in order to decide the best position for the implant.
Currently, this surgery is performed by two surgeons who manually manipulate the wrist, which means that the subjective assessment that is made can be biased by their experience and perception. There are also other systems designed to provide an objective and quantitative assessment, despite them being complicated to set up and impractical to use during surgical procedures. This way, the technology developed by the researchers is meeting these needs, being easy to set up and to use by doctors during a surgery.
This INESC TEC's technology, which has an international patent application, is the result of the research of the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) with the support of São João University Hospital in the Biomedical Engineering field and is now giving rise to a new spin-off in the healthcare area.
InSignals Neurotech is going to be the name of the most recent spin-off of the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC). The future InSignals Neurotech also has the participation of the Frontier IP group from the UK, a specialist in commercialising academic intellectual property and that now has its third spin-off in Portugal.
Potential applications of this technology developed by INESC TEC’s researchers and that will now be commercialised by InSignals Neurotech, include helping pharmaceutical companies to monitor or to assess the impact of new or approved drugs in the rigidity reduction during clinical trials.
The most recent spin-off of INESC TEC has already received the interest from potential industry partners and is now looking to enter into some collaboration agreements in order to extend the number of clinical trials so that their technologies can be tested – currently, two clinical trials have already been performed – in Portugal, the UK and Germany.
For João Paulo Cunha, coordinator of INESC TEC’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering Research (C-BER) and Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), “the creation of the company, which will be named Insignals Neurotech, in collaboration with our partners from Frontier IP, will act as a strong innovation vehicle to consolidate the neurotechnologies that have been developed for several years now by INESC TEC's researchers and the University of Porto – through FEUP and São João University Hospital – and thus, taking a step towards the international market”.
____________________________________________________________________________________
For more information:
Joana Coelho
Communication Service
INESC TEC
FEUP’s Campus
Rua Dr Roberto Frias
4200-465 Porto
Portugal
T +351 22 209 4297
M +351 919 119 271