SPIKEGADGETS, INC. — Department of Health and Human Services STTR Phase I: 101

Description

Psychiatric disorders give rise to aberrant patterns of activity within the complex neural circuits of our brainsYetthe exact nature of these abnormal patterns is often unknown to developers of new treatmentsThe goal of this project is to enable circuit oriented research of neuropsychiatric diseases using rodent disease modelsThe long term objective is to catalyze the discovery of new therapeutic targets for a variety of disordersA new type of research tool will be developed and commercialized that is specialized for high throughputdetailedand long term neural measurements in behaving mice and ratsThis tool is a miniature computer that records electrophysiological signals fromsites in the brain and logs the data onto a Micro SD cardThe system will weigh less than four grams and be carried by animals as small as miceIt can be deployed in diverse behavioral environments at high throughput scale for a fraction of the cost of traditional systemsThe tool will also contain polymer based neural probe technology for long term electrophysiology recordings that will enable researchers to track the progression of aberrant ensemble spiking activity as diseases progress over long time periodsThese probes are ultra flexible and integrate well into neural tissuepermitting stable and high quality spike recordings for overmonthsBy enabling high throughput and long term recordingsthis tool provides a practical way to study the progression of circuit dysfunction using large cohorts of animal disease models This projects aims to catalyze the discovery of new treatments for psychiatric disorders by enabling researchers to study such diseases on the level of neural spiking activity in complex interconnected circuitsA research tool will be commercialized that addresses two major needs involving chronicin vivo electrophysiology in rodent models of diseaselong term recording stability to track disease progressionandpractical system scalability for high throughput research using large animal cohorts