An Innovative Procedure is Restoring Touch to People Who are Paralyzed

The sense of touch is one of the most primitive and foundational human senses. Before babies can properly see, or even hear well, they can feel and gain comfort from touch, according to  the Horizon Project. 

However, people who are paraplegic, either due to strokes or accidents of one kind or another, do not have the ability to feel touch. Thankfully, a new procedure, involving a combination of neuroscience, electronics, and AI, has succeeded in restoring a sense of touch in a paraplegic patient, reported NPR. 

Double Neural Bypass
In 2023, a team of doctors and engineers from the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, implanted two computer chips into the brain of Keith Thomas. He had been left paralyzed from the chest down after a diving accident in 2020. This was the first step in a procedure called a double neural bypass, the goal of which was to restore a sense of touch to Thomas’s hand. 

According to a news release from the institute, the idea of a neural bypass – a brain implant that could be used as an electronic bridge between the brain and paralyzed muscles, first came to Bouton in 2010. In a 2014 trial, a trial participant became the first person to regain movement via a brain implant that was electronically linked to their muscles. 

This was a huge breakthrough, however, the patient, though able to move their arms, could still not feel touch. So, Bouton and his team began the long arduous journey of mapping the regions of the brain connected to sensation in the hand. 

Before Thomas’s 2023 procedure, the team spent months working with him to map out the areas of his brain related to both movement and sensory information. Finally, the team implanted five miniscule microchips in Thomas’s brain which essentially put in the hardware to reestablish a brain to body connection and a brain to spinal cord connections (hence the term, double bypass). 

“We are literally rerouting signals from the brain to muscles that are affected…[and] we have a second branch that reconnects the brain to the spinal cord. As someone thinks about moving again, we stimulate the spinal cord based on their thoughts,” Bouton told NPR.

Amazing Results
More than a year after the surgery, according to Bouton, Thomas can now grasp, raise, and drink from a cup, and has gotten better at interpreting the sensory input from his hand. 

Even more moving, as NPR notes, was his ability to squeeze, and feel his sister’s hand when she made a visit to the lab one day. “The sensation was like a rush of energy,” he said. 

Bringing sensation back to limbs that have lost the ability to move and feel seems like a medical miracle. In reality, it is the result of the hard work and dedication of a huge number of people working diligently and cooperatively to alleviate the suffering of so many patients around the world.