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Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School are literally trying to take the sting out of monitoring muscle deterioration for sufferers of neuromuscular diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
When someone is afflicted with ALS, it’s necessary to test the relative health of the muscle, which often requires painful probing with needles. However, these tests don’t provide information easily, quickly or reliably enough and this makes it challenging to test drugs or therapies on ALS patients. As an alternative, a group of local researchers have created a prototype handheld device that can rapidly do assessments by measuring electrical pulses within the muscles by a non-invasive means, said Seward Rutkove, associate professor of neurology at Harvard.
The researchers have raised some $300,000 in grants, much of it from the Boston-based nonprofit Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. And in April Rutkove’s device was awarded an additional funding between $50,000 and $100,000 from InnoCentive Inc., a Waltham-based online inventors marketplace, and the Cambridge-based nonprofit ALS research sponsor, Prize4Life Inc.
Rutkove worked with electrical engineering experts at MIT to create the handheld probe prototype. The device contains electrodes that disperse electricity into the muscles and measure the resulting voltages. The device connects to a laptop that can interpret the data. Not only does it avoid puncturing the skin, it’s painless and promises to be highly accurate, claimed Rutkove.
“We can get these measurements quickly by putting electric currents through the muscle and that can tell us about the health of the muscle,” he said. This in turn can enable researchers to test different drugs or treatments and tell how relatively effective they are.
While the probe is still in its early stages and evolving, nevertheless it is “very attractive” over the existing testing means — such as using needles to do electrical tests, said William David, associate professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It causes no pain and doesn’t require breaking the patient’s skin. Diagnosing or monitoring neurological diseases and their treatments is particularly difficult when compared with, say, cancer, which produces a tumor that is easily visible and has objective measurements that can be applied to it. Ideally, the system could be collapsed into what would be a neurological type of “stethoscope,” suggested David.
Rutkove indeed wants to create a completely integrated system that consists of a single probe attached to a PDA-like device. Currently, Rutkove and his fellow researchers are testing the device on patients afflicted with ALS, as well as performing work on animals with the disease. Rutkove says that he intends to apply for more grants to pay for more clinical studies, and possibly be ready for the market in the next couple of years.
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