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The nervous system is one of the miracles of life, too easily taken for granted. By helping all parts of the body to communicate with each other, it enables us to move, breathe, think, see, touch, hear and much more. 

Cells called neurons make up the nervous system and the brain, sending and receiving signals. Motor neurons control muscle movements; sensory neurons react to physical and chemical stimuli from the outside environment. 

In our lifetime, disease, injury and ageing can cause the degeneration of these nerve cells. When this happens, our experience of the world through senses such as sight, sound and touch can be reduced or even lost.

“The brain is this big processor that recognises signals from these cells,” explains , co-director of the Sir William Tyree Foundation Institute of Health Engineering (Tyree IHealthE) at �鶹��madou Sydney. “Different diseases can damage those cells in different ways. In the eye, you can get damage to different layers of the retina. In the ear, damage to tiny sensory hair cells in the cochlea can cause hearing loss. And you can get peripheral nerve damage and lose the sensation of touch.”

Neuroprosthetics, such as the cochlear implant device, can interact with the nervous system to restore a lost function. The cochlear implant takes over the role of the sensory hair cells, sending out electrical pulses that stimulate nerve cells to send signals to the brain.

But device engineering is just one way to approach the issue. The other is to look at regenerating the nerve tissue itself, which Laura sees as an exciting area of research. 

Gene therapy to regenerate nerves

“Most of the work that we do in the regeneration field is actually looking at whether we can switch genes on and off, or add genes into a particular tissue or a particular cell to get a specific result,” Laura explains.

She points to the work of , medical lead at Tyree IHealthE and director of �鶹��madou’s Translational Neuroscience Facility. Gary’s work is focused on creating better hearing experiences for users of cochlear implants, putting genes into auditory cells and prompting the neuron to grow closer to the device. 

A better way to deliver gene therapy?

The BaDGE® platform developed by Gary is now one of Tyree IHealthE’s flagship projects. Its full name is ‘Bionic array Directed Gene Electrotransfer DNA/RNA Therapeutics Delivery Platform’, and it uses a localised electric field to precisely target the delivery of therapeutic gene molecules to nerve fibres and other tissues. 

The first clinical trial of the platform is being run with industry partner Cochlea Limited and a team comprising experts from the Macquarie University Hearing Hub, the University of Sydney, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, NextSense (formerly the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children), and the University of Melbourne.

Patients are receiving a cochlear implant device designed to steer DNA directly to the targeted cells. The therapeutic genes should stimulate regeneration of the auditory nerve fibres, and hopefully produce better hearing outcomes.

Other researchers are investigating how they might use BaDGE® to assist in the treatment of epilepsy and eye disease, restoring nerve function (reinnervation), and in vaccines and other therapies.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration 

Gary believes that cross-disciplinary collaboration has had a huge role in the development of BaDGE®, noting that Scientia Professor Professor Nigel Lovell and engineers such as Dr Amr Al Abed from the School of Biomedical Engineering (SBmE) have been crucial to the platform’s success. 

According to Gary, it was the engineers who identified that changing the configuration of the electrodes in the array could control the field of delivery in a way gene delivery has never been controlled before.

“And that’s why this project has worked – because of the skills that the different members of the team bring to the party. That’s the cross-disciplinary mix that makes all the difference,” says Gary.