Twenty years: To Newcastle and beyond

by Marcus Kaiser

16:30 (40 min) in STREAM

While many psychiatric and neurological conditions are treated with pharmaceutical drugs, side effects remain severe. Drugs, once passing through the blood-brain-barrier, affect the whole brain and the regions that are not linked to the brain disorders. Even worse, often drugs don’t work. For a third of epilepsy patients, drugs are ineffective in reducing the number of seizures and for diseases such as dementia, there are no drugs with clear benefits in humans. This situation is unlikely to improve as most recent clinical trials have failed and more and more pharmaceutical companies are quitting brain disorder drug development.

Brain stimulation of offers a potential route to new treatments. However, the effects are often inconsistent between patients, and brain implants are often seen as too invasive and risky by clinicians. Therefore, the scientific challenge is to develop interventions that are personalised and non-invasive. The long-term vision is to replace interventions for many brain disorders with an approach that is: (a) non-invasive through use of focused ultrasound stimulation, and (b) personalised through use of computer models predicting best target and mode of stimulation.