Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/05/2018
3:00 pm
The clinical development of deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapies for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) has suffered numerous set backs over the last 5 years. One major issue was the premature rush to evaluate early iterations of the technology in pivotal clinical trials. However, new scientific insights into the underlying neural circuitry dysfunction of depression, coupled with advanced patient-specific brain imaging tools, are providing an encouraging path forward for the next generation of clinical DBS experiments in TRD. This presentation will highlight the imaging foundation, computational tools, and software infrastructure that is giving new hope to the application of DBS technology for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Bio:
Cameron McIntyre, PhD, was born in Marietta, OH in 1974. He received his BS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1997 and 2001, respectively. His doctoral research focused on the biophysics of the interaction between electric fields and neurons. From 2001 to 2003, he performed postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University and Emory University where he studied deep brain stimulation (DBS). In 2003 he joined the faculty at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and maintained a laboratory there until 2012. In 2013, the McIntyre lab moved to Case Western Reserve University to create the Case Neuromodulation Center.
Cameron is currently appointed as the Tilles-Weidenthal Professor in the School of Medicine Department of Biomedical Engineering. Financial support for the lab has been primarily derived from multiple National Institutes of Health research grants that focus on the neurophysiological effects and engineering design of DBS systems. The fundamental goal of the research program is to use knowledge on the therapeutic mechanisms of DBS to better engineer the next generation of DBS technology. Of particular note, the McIntyre lab invented the GUIDE DBS clinical programming system which was commercialized by the spin-off company IntElect Medical Inc., then acquired by Boston Scientific Neuromodulation Corp and now has CE Mark approval in Europe.