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Paralysis is one of the most serious medical conditions that anyone could suffer, regardless of whether it is partial or full-body. However, new breakthroughs have shown that it can be cured thanks to brain implants. Scientists have successfully allowed a paralyzed monkey to walk again through this method. Now, it’s time to test it out on humans.
With paralysis often being a result of the brain and the nerves being unable to function correctly, adding an intermediary between them to boost connection and response was a good place to start the healing process. This is exactly what scientists did on a monkey that had its spine severed, where they implanted electrodes on the primate’s brain and other parts of its body and made it walk almost instantaneously. Their findings were published in Nature.
This is fantastic news for paralyzed humans because after the primate stage, the scientists can now move on to human trials, Futurism reports. Unfortunately, even with the giant leap that was just made, the authors of the study say that it could take a decade or more before the technology is ready to be used on humans.
Still, this is better than where bioengineering and medicine were before the breakthrough was achieved. In relative terms, ten years isn’t too long for scientific progress, especially one that pertains to such complicated problems as paralysis.
More than that, scientists are now much closer thanks to the similarities between lower primates and humans, so progress might actually happen sooner than expected. The ones behind the project are actually hoping that the first successful case of human trials can occur on 2020, Times reports.
Just to put things in perspective, work on using implants and electrodes to help cure paralysis has been around since the 1970s. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that technology advanced far enough to actually make such a thing possible. Now, it is.
