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The first brain implant made of graphene, hailed as a “wonder material” after its discovery at Manchester university 20 years ago, is set to begin a clinical trial in the city at the end of this month.
Researchers at Manchester’s National Graphene Institute hope the landmark trial will lead to interfaces between the human brain and external computers that are more sensitive than today’s devices.
Potential applications include better treatments for neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and stroke, as well as translating the thoughts of disabled people into speech or movement.
A medical team at Salford Royal hospital is preparing to place a flexible interface with 64 graphene electrodes on the brain of the first trial patient, during neurosurgery to remove a glioblastoma tumour. The implant will stimulate and read neural activity with high precision, so that functional parts of the brain can be preserved when the cancer is cut out.
“The primary objective of this ‘first in human’ trial is to demonstrate the safety of graphene electrodes applied to the brain in eight to ten patients,” said Manchester professor Kostas Kostarelos, chief scientific investigator for the trial. “We’ll also assess the quality of the signals recorded and the implant’s ability to stimulate the brain.”
The implants were produced by InBrain, a neurotech company in Barcelona spun out of the €1bn EU Graphene Flagship programme, in collaboration with the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology and Manchester university.
The next stage, said InBrain chief executive Carolina Aguilar, will be to carry out clinical trials with the company’s therapeutic implant for Parkinson’s disease, which will have two linked components.
One sits on the brain’s surface layer “like a piece of Cellophane”, reading and interpreting its electrical activity, she said. The other is inserted into the brain to give much more precise stimulus to the regions that control movement and other functions impaired by Parkinson’s than any “deep brain stimulation” device available today.
“With artificial intelligence the device can learn from the brain of individual patients to deliver personalised neurological therapy,” Aguilar said.
Graphene sheets consist of a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice — a molecular structure that gives the material extraordinary electrical and mechanical properties. Its discoverers, Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, won the Nobel Physics Prize in 2010, while researchers investigated a host of applications in industries from energy and aerospace to electronics and medical devices.
Although the graphene market has not grown as fast as the early optimists expected, with analysts estimating global sales for 2023 in the $300mn to $400mn region, it is growing at an annual rate above 30 per cent.
“I still think graphene is a ‘wonder material’ because it does many wonderful things,” said Jose Garrido, InBrain’s chief scientist. “It has led to a tremendous number of other scientific discoveries but translating those into applications in competition with established technologies is extremely time-consuming and expensive.”
When it comes to medical applications, “I challenge anyone to show me a new material taken from discovery to the clinic in less than 20 years,” added Kostarelos.
He expressed confidence that graphene’s advantages over the metal electrodes used in other brain computer interfaces would be demonstrated in the clinic: “No other technology offers such a combination of miniaturised, high-resolution interfaces with such selectivity in signal decoding.”