A revolutionary device designed to transform the surgical treatment of brain tumors will undergo its first clinical trial in what scientists say could be a major medical breakthrough.
The brain chip can locate cancer cells by differences in their electrical emissions compared to those of healthy neural tissue.
The device is the size of a postage stamp and is made of graphene, a material that is 200 times stronger than steel and only one atom thick. Graphene was invented 20 years ago by scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their research.
Scientists have since worked to harness graphene’s remarkable conductive properties to develop new electrical and magnetic sensors and other devices. However, the flexible brain chip – now being trialled at Salford Royal Hospital – is being hailed as a medical first. “This is the first ever clinical trial to be conducted anywhere in the world using a graphene-based medical device,” said one of the team leaders, Kostas Kostarelos, professor of nanomedicine in Manchester.
The brain-computer interface (BCI) device was designed and manufactured by an international team of scientists to transform the monitoring of electrical impulses from cells in the brain by using frequencies that previously could not be detected. “Its first use will be to distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells to ensure that operations on brain tumors are performed in a highly accurate manner,” Kostarelos said.
Such a goal is of vital importance, doctors emphasize. More than 12,700 people are diagnosed with a brain tumor in Britain every year and more than 5,000 deaths are attributed to the condition each year. “Anything we can do to improve these numbers will be a major achievement,” he added.
However, the team behind the BCI device also believes it will help scientists study many other conditions – including stroke and epilepsy – by giving them a much better understanding of how electrical signals are transmitted by healthy cells, compared to cells affected by pathological conditions.
“This is a clinical milestone that paves the way for advances in both neural decoding and its application as a therapeutic intervention,” said Carolina Aguilar, co-founder of Inbrain Neuroelectronics, the global spin-off company founded to explore the use of graphene in brain research and treatment.
Cells in the brain interact by exchanging electrical impulses, a process that underlies our thoughts, behavior and perception of the world. Still, monitoring exactly how these cells communicate in this way has been a major headache for scientists. “We can study some electrical signals emitted by brain cells. However, those with very low and very high frequencies are very difficult to detect in the living brain,” Kostarelos said.
“Currently, only those in the mid-range can be monitored. Crucially, the BCI chip can localize a huge range of electrical signals in the brain, including those at very high and very low frequencies.”
To use the device, a piece of a patient’s skull is removed and the tiny, wafer-thin chip – which has thousands of electrical contacts – is placed on top of their brain. Transmitters send out electrical signals to stimulate brain cells and the tiny receivers pick up their responses.
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“Cancer cells do not respond to electrical stimulation caused by the chip, unlike host neuronal cells,” says Kostarelos.
“This allows a surgical team to identify neurons very close to a tumor and that is extremely important. If a tumor is located in parts of the brain, such as those involved in speech, the team will have to be particularly careful. Guided by the signals from the graphene chip, they can remove the diseased cells with more accuracy and confidence.”
The BCI chip’s ability to detect very high and very low frequency signals from brain cells is also important for other reasons. It is known that during strokes and epileptic seizures, very low frequency signals are emitted by cells in the affected parts of the brain. This technology opens up a new way to investigate what happens immediately after someone experiences one of these events.
“The technology – which relies on the remarkable properties of graphene – will help guide surgical interventions in the brain and also enable fundamentally new insights into how the cells in our brain function and interact with each other in a diseased state,” Kostarelos said.