checked
the really interesting part: no implant is necessary
THINK VIRUS
from August 2019 in 'Neuroscience News':
"The best part about sonogenetics is that it doesn’t require a brain implant. For sonogenetics, we use artificially engineered viruses – that are unable to replicate – to deliver genetic material to brain cells. This allows the cells to manufacture sound-sensitive proteins. This method has been used to deliver genetic material to human blood and heart muscle cells in pigs.
Sonogenetics, though still in the very early stages of development, offers a novel therapeutic strategy for various movement-related disorders including Parkinson’s, epilepsy and dyskinesia. In all of these diseases, certain brain cells stop working and prevent normal movements. Sonogenetics could enable doctors to turn on or turn off brain cells at a specific location or time and treat these movement disorders without brain surgery.
For this to work, the target region of the brain would need to be infected with the virus carrying the genes for the sound-sensitive protein. This has been done in mice but not yet in humans. Gene therapy is getting better and more precise, and I am hoping that other researchers will have figured out how to do this by the time we are ready with our sonogenetic technology.
We have received substantial support to advance this technology, fuel the initial study and establish an interdisciplinary team.
With additional funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s ElectRx program, we can focus on finding proteins that can help us “turn off” neurons. We recently discovered proteins that can be manipulated to activate neurons (unpublished work). This is crucial for developing a therapeutic strategy that can be used to treat central nervous system diseases like Parkinson’s."
https://neurosciencenews.com/sonogenetics-brain-control-14689/