Parkinson’s disease, how Facebook founder proposes to treat it

Considering using an intercranial device (Wand) , wireless, capable of recording, stimulating and modifying a monkey’s movements in real time, which once implanted in a human brain could help treat diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

The idea ties in with the largest investment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a project created and supported by the Facebook founder and his wife Priscilla Chan, with the important goal of “curing all existing diseases.”

The project

The capital earmarked for the project amounts to the considerable sum of $5 billion, cash flow from a sale of as many as 29 million Facebook shares.

The small Wand device , among the first co-funded projects ,whose tests have already been carried out on monkeys, was the subject of a scientific study later published in the scientific Journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

The device

UC Berkeley in conjunction with startup Cortera has created Wand, which consists of a small brain pacemaker that can transmit signal from 128 different points in the brain with the help of electrodes and deliver electrical discharges that can influence behavior.

The test conducted on monkeys saw the animals intent on moving a cursor on a screen using a joystick, an action they could perform because of previous training.

Wand modified the animals’ movement by sending an electrical signal into the brain,

The ‘possible use

It is hoped that Wand may be a valuable contribution to treating a range of movement disorders, such as spinal cord injury and epilepsy, due specifically to the ability to anticipate motor action, with the ability to stop it.

Similar projects, such as Elon Musk‘s Neurali, had been started before such as the famous Building 8, also by Facebook, but today this procedure can be conducted , as a relevant novelty, without the use of wires, avoiding that physical link between machine and brain.

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