[HN Gopher] Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
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Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
Author : geox
Score : 208 points
Date : 2023-10-10 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.rice.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.rice.edu)
| rpmisms wrote:
| I'm not a medical person, can anyone who knows more than me
| explain exactly how cool this is? Fixing spinal cords, or just
| repairing simple nerve severance?
| achileas wrote:
| Too early to tell. Might make less invasive neurostimulation
| therapies, may or may not make them more effective (not all
| neurons can grow back or grow back to where they are supposed
| to be).
| busterarm wrote:
| Neuropathy affects a lot of people. Diabetics, for example.
| This could improve a lot of lives.
| trey-jones wrote:
| I too am interested in the applications of this technology and
| also what the timeline for that might look like.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Even small nerve injuries can be life changing. Friend my motor
| cycle rat friends hit a bridge abutment. Severed the nerves in
| his right shoulder. He has no feeling in and cannot move his
| arm. So being able to fix that would be a big deal for people
| affected.
| markisus wrote:
| From the article, the device is more like a bridge rather than
| something that helps the body heal.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Yeah, as far as I understand, it can act like a bridge
| between two ends of a severed nerve.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Give me a pair of bridges and a conductor to make the nerve
| signals travel at electric current speeds and I'll give you
| almost instantaneous reflexes.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I'm very impressed with this advance of modern bio-science - a
| strain of intelligent rice which can be trained in engineering.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Neural lace when?
| ElFitz wrote:
| Considering how hard it is to actually fix any accidental
| damage to brain cells and nerves, and the far-reaching
| consequences of such damage, I am always amazed to see how many
| are eager to just plug something into it and let some arbitrary
| code send electric shocks through their brain.
|
| I get the unfathomable potential of the thing, and the appeal
| of said potential. But that's a product I won't be an early-
| adopter of.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Oh, me neither! But growing up reading scifi and cyberpunk in
| particular, one has to wonder.
| viraptor wrote:
| Yeah, every time something like that is mentioned, I just
| think of small issues that could cause noise on the output.
| Basically if you wear some device that helps you, either
| passive like glasses or active like a hearing aid, you can
| immediately disconnect then if needed. But imagine an implant
| bugs out and you start receiving a maximum signal for
| something without being able to stop. Like a blinding bright
| light which doesn't go away when you close your eyes. As much
| as the cyberpunk idea is fun, I'd have to really suffer
| without some implant to risk it.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body
| around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for
| under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that
| time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.
| grishka wrote:
| Given enough curiosity, anyone can understand how and why a jet
| plane works in as much or as little detail as they want. Planes
| were engineered by humans from first principles and we're good
| at both documenting our inventions and understanding those
| first principles.
|
| Building something to interface with a biological system,
| though, is another matter entirely. It could as well be alien
| technology. It requires reverse engineering a lot of extremely
| complex stuff that was not designed by our civilization. So
| incomprehensibly complex that we only fairly recently made
| enough progress in other fields to be able to build tools to
| meaningfully poke at it.
| root_axis wrote:
| I don't see what's incongruous about it, those two tasks are
| completely different, making a comparison with respect to
| distance isn't meaningful.
| carabiner wrote:
| These seem completely unrelated. One is about travel distance
| the other is about forming tissue connections. We can easily
| travel the distance between brain and a foot, it's around 5 ft.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Individual science disciplines advance at a very uneven speed
| and with different start points in history.
|
| We have always (OK, at least since Ancient Egypt) known more
| about mathematics than about physics.
|
| We have always (...) known more about physics than about
| chemistry.
|
| We have always (...) known more about chemistry than about our
| bodies.
|
| The available technology mirrors that.
| grishka wrote:
| And biology in particular is unique because it requires other
| fields to progress pretty far for the tools necessary for
| comprehensive biological research to become possible. As in,
| a microscope is a prerequisite for the discovery of cells and
| microorganisms.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| So, I'll put this into terms that a sysadmin can understand:
| imagine if all the Ethernet or fiber going to a datacenter rack
| was bundled up, and I cut that bundle up. Now you have to
| splice them back together so that every port is still connected
| to the same port it was before I cut the cables. Oh, and also,
| the cables are microscopic, incredibly fragile, and we don't
| know how to actually repair them. We sort of just hope they can
| grow back in place.
| londons_explore wrote:
| For scale, a human spine has coming off it a few hundred
| thousand nerve fibers inside 31 pairs of nerves.[1]
|
| I was actually expecting more, since that is effectively IO
| for the whole body, and each individual nerve fiber tends not
| to fire more than tens of Hz.
|
| [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612209/
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not the whole body. Eyes and ears have their own high
| bandwidth direct attachment interfaces to the cortex.
| p1esk wrote:
| The fact that they grow back in place makes the whole thing
| 1000x easier, no?
| itishappy wrote:
| Only if it grows back correctly!
|
| Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively
| trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your
| plans).
| garba_dlm wrote:
| here's the kicker
|
| it's all connected to an organic deep neural network
|
| which means that the specific arrangement of the physical
| wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period
| in which the neural network literally learns to control
| the body anyways
| chairhairair wrote:
| If we only ever wanted to reconnect nerves of fetuses
| that might be relevant.
| knome wrote:
| There's no reason to be glib. If patients' brains can
| reconfigure following trauma such as strokes [1] or
| having our entire visual field flipped [2] there's no
| reason to assume one couldn't reroute around having
| nerves hooked up differently.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK326735/ [2] htt
| ps://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable
| ...
| tsavo wrote:
| Can speak from personal experience. Traumatic incident
| which severed the nerves to my leg in multiple places.
| Nerves eventually regrew and reconnected within the leg,
| and then again where they were severed in the foot.
|
| Motor and senory nerves reacted differently.
|
| When motor nerves reconnected, I still couldn't contract
| the muscles and went through a series of steps to relearn
| how to use the limb. First I was trying to "move" the
| leg, but effectively the "IP address" for the leg was
| changed so my "move" signals were going to where my head
| thought the leg was instead of to the new connection.
| Instead, I would estim a specific muscle and "listen" in
| my head for where "noise" was coming from. That "noise"
| was the electric buzzing from the estim'd muscle
| contraction. Eventually, I learned how to concentrate to
| make a muscle contract, and many steps later (pun
| intended), I learned to walk again.
|
| Sensory nerves didn't need a push signal, they're like a
| constant inbound feed when connected. When the sensory
| nerves reconnected, it is something you definitely
| notice. Going about your day, and suddenly you feel an
| jolt, like being shocked, and over the next few hours to
| days the area that is reconnecting is burning, stinging,
| feels like it is being crushed by pressure, and cold all
| at the same time. It was much more intense than when your
| arm falls asleep. The sensation can be maddening but it
| eventually passes as your body begins to sort and
| acclimate the signals.
|
| All of these steps on calibrating the sensory nerves and
| learning how to contract and coordinate muscles is
| something we take for granted as people usually sort it
| out when they're infants.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I've had exactly these experiences following a spinal
| injury -- fracture of a vertebra but with minimal cord
| damage and quite a lot of disruption to the dorsal root
| ganglia.
|
| You can't put into words how weird it is to fall over
| because your brain thinks your foot is somewhere it
| isn't. Or how suddenly you become incredibly aware of how
| the front of your calf feels. Or how overjoyed you are to
| be able to move your toes again for the first time in a
| year. It's not like what you see on the movies.
|
| Wallerian degeneration -- yes, degeneration -- is part of
| the healing process of some grades of nerve injury.
| Things literally get worse before they get better, as the
| fragment left of the crushed axon degenerates to its root
| and then regrows. It's incredibly slow -- around 1mm/day
| at most -- and a matter of probabilities. What's also
| worth mentioning is that there are plenty of internal
| nerves too, where restoring function after a trauma would
| be life-changing -- like the Vegas nerve, which buggers
| up lots of things if damaged slightly, or, in my case,
| some of the nerves in the fundus and neck of the bladder,
| meaning that my toileting is really very different than
| it was before.
|
| I'm glad you're doing better, and hope you continue to do
| so. I've no idea if the device the article is talking
| about will ever help, but nerve injuries cause so much
| disability worldwide I'm glad they're continuing to be
| worked on.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Except the arrangement starts to matter more and more
| with age.
| garba_dlm wrote:
| depends on the person
|
| most old people actually matter less and less with age
| 2devnull wrote:
| No.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Unless they get weird and turn cancerous, or some kind of
| strange Ethernet-eating bug attacks and eats them etc.
|
| Regenerative medicine of living tissues is extra hard.
| xwdv wrote:
| The class of problems that falls under the category of movement
| of matter is fairly trivial.
|
| Repairing severed nerves is more like an entropy-reversal class
| problem. I don't think we could even put a sufficiently broken
| tea cup back together exactly as it was.
| [deleted]
| finite_depth wrote:
| It might help to remember that a human body has more cells than
| there are people on Earth by around three orders of magnitude,
| and that you're engineering things on the scale of nano- or
| micrometers.
|
| A typical human cell is on the order of 10 micrometers. If you
| need to bridge even 1 cm of that, you're bridging ~a thousand
| cell-widths. If you think of a cell as the somatic equivalent
| of a house in a city, that's the equivalent of an
| infrastructure project spanning (based on a quick count of the
| number of houses on each block in Oakland) the equivalent of
| around six miles, or roughly from downtown Oakland to El
| Cerrito on a map of the Bay (~4 BART stations). And you have to
| do that on a scale where precision manufacturing is incredibly
| hard, where you're dealing with extremely difficult problems of
| chemical synthesis, in a living body, without provoking the
| body's defense or repair mechanisms to stop you. And that's
| assuming you even know what you're trying to do, which requires
| an understanding of the machinery of those cells that we often
| don't have.
| havnagiggle wrote:
| Some things turn out to be hard to do.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Yes, and a lot of those things are done.
|
| It's just interesting the way we've progressed.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| You're not thinking hard enough
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Ever tried splicing fiber optic cable by hand compared to say
| telephone wire ???.
|
| How does the bus protocol work - it is not like it is 5V/-5V ,
| it is insanely complex ???.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| People think medicine is way more advanced that it actually is.
| We can't add back some crystals on a tooth. We can't re-attach
| a nail to a nail bed. We can't fix cartilage. We can't
| physically repair arteries (short of donor material) or
| varicose veins. List goes on and on.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Is that interesting? It seems natural. Precision has always
| been quite hard. Most people can kick a ball 10 m more easily
| than they can kick a ball 1 m but to center the hit at a 1 mm
| spot. I can carry a pile of sand 100 m easier than I can move 1
| grain of sand precisely 1 cm without disturbing the others
| around it.
| tired_and_awake wrote:
| University hosted announcements (e.g. rice.edu announces a major
| breakthrough) have incentives that are so out of wack it's
| basically clickbait at this point.
|
| Researchers oversell their results for publishing and funding
| purposes. Then the university oversells those results to draw in
| students/investors.
|
| Curious if others feel the same way or if I'm just too cynical at
| this point...
| anoxor wrote:
| 30 % of physics and chemistry can't be replicated. 70 % of soft
| science can't be replicated. Most of what we know about
| sociology may just be fake, and given that a huge foundation of
| progressive thought around rase, sex, and gender is based on
| this, this is a big problem.
|
| at a minimum, this isn't far off
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| > 30 % of physics and chemistry can't be replicated.
|
| Is this true? I left academia a long time ago, but I'd be
| surprised if it's that good. I'd actually suspect it's the
| inverse and only 30% can be replicated.
| bluGill wrote:
| Who knows? Most science nobody attempts to replicate. The
| major stuff yes, but small things are not worth the cost or
| time.
| beambot wrote:
| I understand the cynicism. Academic reporting is a _hard_ &
| thankless gig.
|
| The non-cynical version: Half of a researcher's job is
| disseminating results -- to other researchers & the populace at
| large. I'd much rather have excited university announcements
| (even over-reaching ones) than the rage-porn news that
| dominates the airwaves & "mainstream news" homepages.
|
| Besides: Any serious researcher will just revert to the actual
| peer-reviewed source material. It was linked in the article.
| Here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01680-4
|
| And here's the PDF:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.24.477527v2....
|
| As someone who has peripheral knowledge in this space
| (piezeoelectric & magnetostrictive devices and neural
| stimulation & recording): I've never seen a magnetostrictive
| material capable of developing a DC bias. Further, driving the
| device in a non-resonant mode for neural stimulation is even
| more new to me -- that's quite fascinating, and I'd say that
| article lives up to the hype from my 1000-ft vantage. I.e. This
| was effective reporting.
| imnotdang wrote:
| [flagged]
| Terr_ wrote:
| That makes me think of this comic on the news cycle:
| https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
| [deleted]
| codeisawesome wrote:
| Would it be possible in a sci-fi near-future to transplant a new,
| lab-grown vertebral column, using something like this?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Imagine a lab-grown vertebral column where nerve signals travel
| at electric current speeds.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| CS:GO and StarCraft would need new leagues
| m463 wrote:
| speaking of scifi
|
| I wonder... especially after reading about people developing
| limbs or fingers they don't have:
|
| "Some of CTRL-Labs' goals are mind-bendingly exotic, like
| training a model for controlling extra fingers.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c...
|
| I wonder if we could augment/cross our nerves to control things
| we normally can't control? what if we could release hormones on
| demand, like maybe release adrenaline or calm down?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Reminds me of a few hilarious plot points in a few Ian Banks
| novels. One of them, the Hydrogen Sonata had this passage:
|
| "Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?"
| "No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that
| was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the
| maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an
| erection in all of them at the same time, even with four
| hearts."
|
| Silly as this is, Ian Banks had a way of taking the mere hint
| of the possibility of a thing to it's logical extremes. His
| characters change sex, regrow limps, or morph themselves into
| a different alien species basically in an orgy of hedonism
| and utopianism. Definitely science fiction/fantasy when he
| wrote it but eerily close to becoming science fact as time
| progresses.
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