Speaker Details

Biography

Professor Rob Shepherd is the Principal Scientist of The Bionics Institute and Head of the Medical Bionics Department at the University of Melbourne. He was Director of the Bionics Institute from 2005-2017. In the 1980’s he led the preclinical team that demonstrated the safety and efficacy of Cochlear's bionic ear in both adults and children, and more recently his team developed a prototype bionic eye as part of an Australia-wide collaboration – Bionic Vision Australia – to develop a commercial bionic eye. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, given more than 100 invited international keynote conference presentations and received over $95M of research funding as chief investigator. Prof Shepherd directed the expansion of the Bionic Ear Institute into the Bionics Institute, broadening its research portfolio and introduced a contract research organisation specialising in in vitro and in vivo R&D associated with neural prostheses. In 2014 he was awarded the Garnett Passe Medal at the Royal Society of Medicine, London; 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the “Knowledge Nation 100” of Australia’s top innovators; and in 2017 the bionic eye was commercialised through Bionic Vision Technologies with a capital investment of $24m. He was recently appointed the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the journal Bioelectronics in Medicine (https://www.futuremedicine.com/journal/bem)

Abstract

Delivering Health Solutions through Neurotechnology

Neurotechnology or medical bionics are engineered devices that record from and/or electrically stimulate excitable tissue in order to improve health outcomes. Since the introduction of the first heart pacemaker in the 1950s, there have been a number of bionic devices approved for clinical use, resulting in a dramatic impact on the quality of life of millions of people around the world. These technologies depend on fundamental biomedical engineering principles and a thorough understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the target neural population. This talk will provide an overview of the design principles of bionic devices, using examples from our research including cochlear implants for the treatment of severe hearing loss and retinal prostheses for the treatment of end-stage retinitis pigmentosa. Five devices currently dominate neural stimulation from a clinical perspective: cochlear implants that stimulate the auditory nerve to treat profound hearing loss; spinal cord stimulation to treat severe chronic back pain; vagal nerve stimulation to treat epilepsy and depression; deep brain stimulation to alleviate the motor disorders associated with Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor; and sacral root stimulation to provide bladder control in patients with spinal cord injury. These five devices have a market size of $7.6 billion (2016) with a projected growth of 7-17% percent compound annual growth rate. Significantly, there are a large number of devices currently undergoing development, fuelling expectations that this field will undergo major expansion over the next decade. One example is "bioelectronics" designed to treat a broad range of diseases, from arthritis to Crohn’s disease using excitatory or inhibitory neuromodulation techniques. These initiatives call for significant multidisciplinary collaboration including the development of detailed anatomical and physiological maps of neural circuits associated with the disease and the implementation of safe neural stimulation paradigms. The author has no financial interest in any technology described in this presentation Supported by the NIH, DARPA, NHMRC, ARC, Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Foundation and the Victorian Government