DB-Scan

DEVELOPMENT OF A NEURAL SCANNING PROBE FOR TREATMENT OF DEPRESSION BY DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION

Summary

Deep brain stimulation of the superolateral medial forebrain bundle (slMFB) is proposed aspotential therapy for treatment resistant depression, even though the underlying mechanisms arenot yet fully understood [Galvez 2015]. Electrical stimulation studies in rodents have shownmodulation of Dopamine (DA) release in the nucleus accumbens after stimulation of the medialforebrain bundle (Ashouri-Vajari 2020). Monitoring of DA release with chemical sensors andmethods like fast scanning cyclic voltammetry is only established in few groups worldwide andresults are hardly reproducible. Fibre photometry is another option to monitor release of dopamineafter medial forebrain bundle stimulation in rodent models (Miguel Telega 2022). Understandingof effects of the stimulation on the dopamine release need, however, spatially selective stimulationand a variation of stimulation parameters (pulse width, amplitude, repetition frequency) that gobeyond the limits of clinically approved medical devices. Same is true for deep brain stimulationprobes. While experimental work mainly uses twisted wires with one to two contact sites (Ashouri-Vajari 2020), micromachined systems offer higher channel counts for spatial selectivity (Ashouri Vajari 2018) and graphitic carbon as electrode and track material (Devi 2021) to allow for highfield (7T) MRI without imaging artefacts. Results from rodent studies should be of value fortranslational studies in humans. Therefore, general designs of deep brain stimulation electrodesshould be transferred into probes for the rodent model and should be brought back via reversetranslation into intraoperative human clinical studies in follow-up projects to this research work.

Previous Related Publication

Ashouri Vajari, D., Vomero, M., Erhardt, J. B., Sadr, A., Ordonez, J. S., Coenen, V. A., &Stieglitz, T. (2018). Integrity Assessment of a Hybrid DBS Probe that EnablesNeurotransmitter Detection Simultaneously to Electrical Stimulation and Recording.Micromachines, 9(10), 510. doi.org/10.3390/mi9100510

Ashouri Vajari, D., Ramanathan, C., Tong, Y., Stieglitz, T., Coenen, V. A., & Döbrössy, M. D.(2020). Medial forebrain bundle DBS differentially modulates dopamine release in thenucleus accumbens in a rodent model of depression. Experimental neurology, 327,113224. doi.org/10.1016/j.expneurol.2020.113224

Devi, M., Vomero, M., Fuhrer, E., Castagnola, E., Gueli, C., Nimbalkar, S., Hirabayashi, M.,Kassegne, S., Stieglitz, T., & Sharma, S. (2021). Carbon-based neural electrodes:promises and challenges. Journal of neural engineering, 18(4), 10.1088/1741-2552/ac1e45. doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ac1e45

Gálvez, J. F., Keser, Z., Mwangi, B., Ghouse, A. A., Fenoy, A. J., Schulz, P. E., Sanches, M.,Quevedo, J., Selvaraj, S., Gajwani, P., Zunta-Soares, G., Hasan, K. M., & Soares, J. C.(2015). The medial forebrain bundle as a deep brain stimulation target for treatmentresistant depression: A review of published data. Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology& biological psychiatry, 58, 59-70. doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2014.12.003

Miguel Telega, L., Ashouri Vajari, D., Stieglitz, T., Coenen, V. A., & Döbrössy, M. D. (2022). NewInsights into In Vivo Dopamine Physiology and Neurostimulation: A Fiber PhotometryStudy Highlighting the Impact of Medial Forebrain Bundle Deep Brain Stimulation on theNucleus Accumbens. Brain sciences, 12(8), 1105.https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12081105