This one aims to develop a one-two punch of cutting-edge devices with the potential to revolutionize both diagnostics and treatment in spinal cord injury cases. Best known for its funding in the 1960s of ARPANET, a key precursor of the internet, DARPA specializes in supporting high-risk, high-reward projects. Late last year, Theodore and Manbachi received a five-year, $13.48 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the U.S. The map that emerged from that capstone project is still in play, though it has evolved over time into a highly ambitious undertaking. In short order, Manbachi was supervising the work of a team headed by engineering student Ana Ainechi. The pitch was a hit-one of the most popular proposals among the 20 or so options presented to students that year. He wanted a team of Whiting School students to develop a map pointing the way toward better outcomes for spinal cord injury patients. Theodore’s pitch to the Design Team program was that the way out of this Groundhog Day predicament might well be achieved through biomedical engineering. Otherwise, however, the treatment regimen is mostly a matter of helping patients adjust to new realities marked by pain and paralysis. After surgery, they monitor blood pressure very carefully, tinkering frequently in an effort to reduce the risk of dangerous secondary injuries. In the aftermath of an injury, they open up a patient and “decompress” the spinal cord, clearing out stray pieces of bone and pockets of hematoma to stabilize the spine. In spinal cord injury repair, he told Manbachi and his students, surgeons are still doing “the same rudimentary things that we’ve been doing for 50 years.”
JIM DUFFY TAKENOTE MOVIE
Five years ago, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Nicholas Theodore brought a problem with echoes of the movie Groundhog Day to biomedical engineer Amir Manbachi, who was then teaching in the Undergraduate Design Team program at the Whiting School.Īn expert in spinal cord injuries, Theodore was frank in noting that no significant new drugs or treatments had been developed over the previous half a century.