Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CResPace (Adaptive Bio-electronics for Chronic Cardiorespiratory Disease)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-07-01 bis 2022-12-31
The CResPace consortium answers this challenge by bringing together multidisciplinary academic and industrial research teams from across Europe to develop fit-and-forget medical devices.These devices will be able to adapt to the physiological signals that regulate bodily functions and in this way restore functions that are lost through disease(s).We devise sophisticated mathematical tools and computational techniques that enable bioelectronic implants to read nervous activity in real time and help diseased organs save energy and restore normal function.This vision is embodied in a novel prototype of cardiac resynchronization pacemaker that provides beat-to-beat adaptation of heart rate and heart chamber timings to arterial gas pressure, hemodynamics and respiration.
The main objectives of the project are to develop:
a. large scale data assimilation tools to build quantitative models of medullary neurons and small networks
b. an integrated circuit of the respiratory central pattern generator
c. a central pattern generator designed to reproduce beat-to-beat cardiac resynchronization and an evaluation of its safety envelope
d. an intelligent cardiac resynchronization pacemaker that respond to physiological feedback and its clinical benefits
b. The technology for miniaturizing arterial gas sensors and blood pressure sensors has matured to the point where these sensors may be translated to a wider range of bioelectronic devices which will increase the quality of life of patients by monitoring and adapting to physiological feedback in-vivo.
c. The methods and knowhow we have developed while building adaptive bioelectronics in the context of cardiac resynchronization therapy form a body of knowledge that may now be transposed to other fields, for example training neural networks to provide therapies to other chronic diseases (e.g. spinal cord injury) and to provide biocircuits that can be used to repair biological circuits lost to disease (Alzheimer, channelopathies).
d. Key recent findings have been published in Nature Communications (Dec 2019) and the Journal of Physiology (Dec 2019).