“Rodney Gorham recently passed a milestone that few people have reached. He’s had a brain-computer interface implanted for five years.

Made by startup Synchron, the experimental implant allows him to control a computer and other digital devices around his home using just his thoughts. It’s been a lifeline for 65-year-old Gorham, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and can no longer walk, talk, or move his hands.

Synchron is among several companies, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink, aiming to commercialize brain-computer interfaces to help individuals with paralysis. Over the past five years, Synchron’s software and hardware have gone through many iterations, with Gorham helping to shape the evolution of the technology. Out of the 10 volunteers to get Synchron’s implant, Gorham has been living with it the longest. He received it in December 2020 as part of a trial in Australia. (The longest-ever user of an implanted brain-computer interface is Nathan Copeland, who’s had one for more than 10 years. He has four research-grade arrays in his brain made by Blackrock Neurotech.)”

From Wired.

“In 2024, Eon senior scientist Philip Shiu and collaborators published in Nature a computational model of the entire adult Drosophila melanogaster brain, containing more than 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, built from the FlyWire connectome and machine learning predictions of neurotransmitter identity. That model predicted motor behavior at 95% accuracy. But it was disembodied: a brain without a body, activation without physics, motor outputs with nowhere to go.

Now the brain has somewhere to go. Building on previous work, including Shiu et al.’s whole-brain computational model, the NeuroMechFly v2 embodied simulation framework, and Özdil et al.’s research on centralized brain networks underlying body part coordination, this demonstration integrates Eon’s connectome-based brain emulation with a physics-simulated fly body in MuJoCo. The result: multiple distinct behaviors driven by the emulated brain’s own circuit dynamics. Sensory input flows in, neural activity propagates through the complete connectome, motor commands flow out, and a physically simulated body executes the output, closing the loop from perception to action for the first time in a whole-brain emulation.”

From The Innermost Loop.

“Twenty years after they were first created in Japan, extraordinarily versatile stem cells made from the body’s own cells may finally realize their promise for regenerating diseased tissue. Last month, an advisory panel to Japan’s health ministry recommended limited marketing approval for therapies using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells for heart failure and Parkinson’s disease. In a controversial arrangement, their makers will be able to sell the products for 7 years while continuing studies to determine just how well the therapies work. IPS cells are moving closer to medical use in other countries as well, with dozens of potential therapies in clinical trials…

One of the new therapies, intended for heart disease patients, was developed by Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) in collaboration with a University of Osaka group led by cardiovascular surgeon Yoshiki Sawa. Heart muscle cells derived from iPS cells are formed into small patches. Applied to a diseased heart’s surface, the muscle patches boost contraction while also releasing cytokines that promote blood vessel formation.

Eight heart disease patients have received RiHEART patches made by Cuorips, a startup spun off from the university. The company has reported in press briefings and two peer-reviewed papers—in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine in 2022 and 2023—that there were no serious safety issues and patients’ heart function improved.

The Parkinson’s therapy, developed by a group led by neurosurgeon Jun Takahashi, CiRA’s current director, coaxes iPS cells to form replacements for the dopamine-producing neurons that die off in Parkinson’s. In a small pilot trial, surgeons drilled holes into the skulls of six Parkinson’s patients and injected the replacement cells. There were no safety issues, and four of the patients showed improvement 24 months after transplantation, Takahashi and colleagues reported in Nature last year. Sumitomo Pharma and RACTHERA are commercializing the treatment, dubbed Amchepry.”

From Science.

“The DNA foundation model Evo 2 has been published in the journal Nature. Trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life, Evo 2 can identify patterns in gene sequences across disparate organisms that experimental researchers would need years to uncover. The machine learning model can accurately identify disease-causing mutations in human genes and is capable of designing new genomes that are as long as the genomes of simple bacteria.”

From Phys.org.