The Shirley Ryan AbilityLab received an $8.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to significantly advance the field of bionics by applying osseointegration (OI) in a novel manner. The study is the first to combine OI, targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), and pattern recognition control using implanted electromyographic (EMG) sensors.
TMR was developed by collaborators at Northwestern Medicine and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab to give people with amputations control of bionic prostheses. The study will also be the first in-home trial of the Enhanced Osseoanchored Prostheses for the Rehabilitation of Amputees (e-OPRA) system in people with upper-limb amputations who have had TMR surgery and use a Coapt Gen2 pattern recognition–controlled myoelectric prosthesis.
“With this combination of novel and advanced technologies, the device should feel much more like a person’s actual limb,” said Levi Hargrove, PhD, the study’s lead researcher and director of the Regenstein Foundation Center for Bionic Medicine at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. “This study builds on many years of our leadership in bionic medicine, and marks a significant step forward in making this intuitive technology broadly available for the first time.”
As part of the study, Shirley Ryan Ability is partnering with Integrum, a Swedish company that invented the OI technique, and Northwestern Medicine, which will implant the device and perform TMR surgery on eight research subjects. Researchers at UChicagoMedicine and Bionics Institute in Australia also will support the study.
Following the surgeries, the research team will lead two clinical trials to evaluate the comfort and function with implanted electrodes through e-OPRA—compared to and combined with the state-of-the-art clinical solution using Coapt’s Gen2 pattern recognition system—and to evaluate the effects of providing sensory feedback.
“Engineers, material scientists, neurophysiologists, and surgeons have never before come together on this scale to apply osseointegration in this manner,” said Rickard Branemark, CEO and founder of Integrum AB. “We are very excited to collaborate on this important work.”
The five-year grant is being funded through the NIH’s UG3 and UH3 mechanisms, which are targeted to translating groundbreaking neural technologies for patients.
The award comes on the heels of a recently funded $1.5 million US Department of Defense grant for Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and its research collaborators to evaluate functional mobility, neural control, and user satisfaction as they relate to OI in bionic legs.
