Preclinical Development of Personalized Functional Markers for Deep Brain Stimulation

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is used to treat neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. To date, DBS devices have been implanted in more than 300,000 patients worldwide. However, the efficacy of DBS therapy varies across patients, leaving a substantial number of patients without significant symptom alleviation. Optimizing therapeutic outcomes is highly desirable for the patients’ well-being as well as to reduce socio-economic burden of untreated disorders. One of the major impeding obstacles is the difficulty to precisely localize DBS targets in individual patient brains. Despite research into alternatives, the need for optimizing target localization for DBS remains unmet. The recent discovery of a hitherto unreported neural oscillation, enabled by my previous ERC Starting Grant DirectThalamus, is a promising solution to these challenges. The novel oscillation is spatially confined to the proximity of established DBS targets and could thus be used as a functional marker to improve localization and reduce non-responder rates. Funding from the ERC Proof of Concept aims to support essential preclinical steps towards establishing a functional marker of DBS targets that is associated with superior clinical outcomes. Those include optimization of detection algorithms, exploration of alternative access routes to deep brain electrophysiology and evaluation of the functional marker in larger cohorts. The goal of the project is to finalize preclinical work and prepare the implementation and funding of a clinical trial with the goal to realize the approach in clinical routines. By integrating cutting-edge neuroscience with medicine and fostering collaboration among researchers, clinicians and medical device specialists, the project aims to optimize therapy effectiveness, advance DBS technologies and pave the way for the next generation neuromodulation: personalized DBS treatment.