Brown scientist John P. Donoghue wins major neuroscience award

The system, called BrainGate, is being developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc., a company Donoghue co-founded and which he currently serves as chief scientific officer.

BrainGate consists of an implantable sensor and external processors that record and decode brain signals from the motor cortex, turning these signals into movement commands that can control assistive devices. The system is being tested in a clinical trial that has enrolled four patients with paralysis – two with quadreplegia, one with brain stem stroke and the other with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Results show that patients can use the system to read e-mail, control a television, play video games, operate a robotic arm and control a wheelchair. Results from the first clinical trial patient were featured as the cover story for the journal Nature in July 2006.

The founding chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Brown, Donoghue has served on review boards for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and NASA. In 2002, he received a Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health. In 2006, he was inducted a fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering and named a runner-up for Scientist of the Year by Discover magazine.

The Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation

Gertrud Reemtsma set up the foundation in 1989 in honor of her late brother, the neurologist Klaus Joachim Zülch, former director of the Cologne-based General Neurology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. It was her aim to keep alive the memory of her late brother’s work and to promote and give recognition to extraordinary achievements in basic neurological research.

Gertrud Reemtsma was a major patron of the Max Planck Society. She died in Hamburg in 1996 at the age of 80. Today, the Max Planck Society administers the foundation as a trust.

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