(LinkedIn) "The failure we observe in chronic BCI recordings is not purely a materials problem or a surgical problem. It is partly a cellular biology problem. And cellular biology problems have biological solutions." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tkozai_neuroscience-drugdiscovery-neurotechnology-share-7435399179738300416--t8T #BCI #NeuroTech #neuroscience
"๐จโ๐ฉโ๐งโ๐ฆ The field has spent enormous resources making better electrodes. We may also need to make better biological neighborhoods for those electrodes to live in."
๐ The Drug That Helped Brain Implants, and What It Taught Us ๐ฉบ A few years ago, my lab asked a simple question: if oligodendrocyte dysfunction is contributing to BCI failure, can we fix it with a drug? We chose Clemastine, an antihistamine that has been shown in other contexts to promote oligodendrocyte differentiation and myelination. It is FDA-approved, orally administered, crosses the blood-brain barrier, and has a known safety profile. It targets signaling pathways specific to oligodendrocytes through muscarinic receptors. If you wanted to test the oligodendrocyte hypothesis in a living brain, it was a reasonable tool. ๐ The results were striking. In mice receiving Clemastine starting one week before electrode implantation, myelin levels near the electrode were roughly 180% of controls. Chronic recording stability improved by approximately 140%. Critically, inhibitory neuronal activity, the first thing to degrade in our recordings without intervention, was substantially better preserved. ๐งซ Demonstrating that a drug targeting oligodendrocytes improves chronic BCI recording requires a living brain, a functioning immune system, intact vasculature, and months of electrophysiology, conditions no current non-animal model (NAMs) can provide. โ ๏ธ I want to be careful about how I frame this. Clemastine is not a BCI treatment. These are rodent experiments, and translation from rodent to human is never guaranteed. The appropriate response to these findings is not to start taking Clemastine before a BCI surgery. It is to take the oligodendrocyte hypothesis seriously as a target, fund research to understand the mechanism more deeply, and explore whether this or related compounds have a role in improving device longevity in humans. ๐ But the experiment taught us something beyond the drug effect. The fact that a pharmacological intervention targeting a non-neuronal cell type, not neurons, not the electrode surface, not the biomaterial coating, could meaningfully change recording performance is itself important. It tells us that the failure we observe in chronic BCI recordings is not purely a materials problem or a surgical problem. It is partly a cellular biology problem. And cellular biology problems have biological solutions. ๐จโ๐ฉโ๐งโ๐ฆ The field has spent enormous resources making better electrodes. We may also need to make better biological neighborhoods for those electrodes to live in. Clemastine: https://lnkd.in/eyNPriA9 Fus in Oligo: https://lnkd.in/eFErQ2i9 #Neuroscience #DrugDiscovery #Neurotechnology #BrainComputerInterface #Bioengineering
๐ The Drug That Helped Brain Implants, and What It Taught Us ๐ฉบ A few years ago, my lab asked a simple question: if oligodendrocyte dysfunction is contributing to BCI failure, can we fix it with a drug? We chose Clemastine, an antihistamine that has been shown in other contexts to promote oligodendrocyte differentiation and myelination. It is FDA-approved, orally administered, crosses the blood-brain barrier, and has a known safety profile. It targets signaling pathways specific to oligodendrocytes through muscarinic receptors. If you wanted to test the oligodendrocyte hypothesis in a living brain, it was a reasonable tool. ๐ The results were striking. In mice receiving Clemastine starting one week before electrode implantation, myelin levels near the electrode were roughly 180% of controls. Chronic recording stability improved by approximately 140%. Critically, inhibitory neuronal activity, the first thing to degrade in our recordings without intervention, was substantially better preserved. ๐งซ Demonstrating that a drug targeting oligodendrocytes improves chronic BCI recording requires a living brain, a functioning immune system, intact vasculature, and months of electrophysiology, conditions no current non-animal model (NAMs) can provide. โ ๏ธ I want to be careful about how I frame this. Clemastine is not a BCI treatment. These are rodent experiments, and translation from rodent to human is never guaranteed. The appropriate response to these findings is not to start taking Clemastine before a BCI surgery. It is to take the oligodendrocyte hypothesis seriously as a target, fund research to understand the mechanism more deeply, and explore whether this or related compounds have a role in improving device longevity in humans. ๐ But the experiment taught us something beyond the drug effect. The fact that a pharmacological intervention targeting a non-neuronal cell type, not neurons, not the electrode surface, not the biomaterial coating, could meaningfully change recording performance is itself important. It tells us that the failure we observe in chronic BCI recordings is not purely a materials problem or a surgical problem. It is partly a cellular biology problem. And cellular biology problems have biological solutions. ๐จโ๐ฉโ๐งโ๐ฆ The field has spent enormous resources making better electrodes. We may also need to make better biological neighborhoods for those electrodes to live in. Clemastine: https://lnkd.in/eyNPriA9 Fus in Oligo: https://lnkd.in/eFErQ2i9 #Neuroscience #DrugDiscovery #Neurotechnology #BrainComputerInterface #Bioengineering
๐ง ๐ง Brain-to-Brain communication has moved beyond science fiction, but our understanding of the present reality has not.
โ We need public education and discussion about mental privacy issues brought on by the advent of neurotechnological advances.
#b2b #braintobrain #braincomputerinterface #bci #braintobraininterface #bbi #neurosecurity #neurotech #neurorights #consent #privacy #mentalprivacy
X Freeze (@XFreeze)
Neuralink์ ์์ ๋ก๋ด์ด ๋ํ๊ด์ ํผํ๋ฉด์ ๋ฏธ์ธ ์ค์ ๋งค์ฐ ์ ๋ฐํ๊ฒ ์ฝ์ ํ๊ณ , ๋์ ์์ง์์ ์ค์๊ฐ์ผ๋ก ์ ์ํด ๊ฑฐ์ ๋ชจ๋ ๋ ์์ญ์ ๋๋ฌํ ์ ์๊ฒ ๋๋ค๋ ๋ด์ฉ์ด๋ค. ๋์์ ๊ธฐ์ํ๋ ๋ค์ํ ์งํ์ ํด๊ฒฐํ๋ ๋ฒ์ฉ ์ ๊ฒฝ ์ธํฐํ์ด์ค๋ฅผ ์งํฅํ๋ค๊ณ ์๊ฐํ๋ค.
https://x.com/XFreeze/status/2052751190006338018
#neuralink #surgicalrobot #braininterface #neurotech #medicalai
Neuralinkโs surgical robot can now reach any brain region with extreme precision - inserting ultra-fine threads while dodging blood vessels and adapting in real time to brain movement โA generalized neural interface to help solve any condition that originates in the brainโ As
The vOICe vision BCI ๐ง ๐ช๐บ
The vOICe vision BCI ๐ง ๐ช๐บ
Mental privacy matters.
sayzard