PRIME - A Personalized Living Cell Synthetic Computational Circuit for Sensing and Treating Neurodegenerative Disorders

Epilepsy is one of the most common serious neurological condition, affecting about 1% of the population, i.e. about 60 million people globally and 6 million in Europe. The most significant clinical aspect of epilepsy is recurrent  seizures. Available electrical stimulation devices have several shortcomings: their efficacy is modest, they respond only as the seizure is already occurring, they require bulky implanted batteries. Thus, safer, more effective and biologically intuitive solutions are required. The alternative and radical approach proposed in PRIME is to implant engineered cells with logic computing gate, sensing and actuation functions to control seizures.

The main objective in PRIME is to develop an autonomous implantable living cell system that sense, compute, and actuate epileptic seizure suppression. These cells will be implanted into the brain and will co-exist with natural neural tissue in a porous encapsulation membrane device.  To tackle the challenge, the project brings together synthetic biology, computer science, communication engineering, nanomedicine, bioengineering and material science.

MET faculty's role in the project:

Our role at MET is to develop the porous encapsulation membrane and test its functionality in an human stem cell -based in vitro epilepsy model.

To manage epileptic seizures, the project develops technology for implantable programmable biological devices. In addition to epilepsy, the technology is extendable to other neurological diseases which are one of the most complex medical challenges of this century.

South East Technological University (Ireland)