Psychiatric disorders give rise to aberrant patterns of activity within the complex neural circuits of our brains. Yet, the exact nature of these abnormal patterns is often unknown to developers of new treatments. The goal of this project is to enable circuit oriented research of neuropsychiatric diseases using rodent disease models. The long term objective is to catalyze the discovery of new therapeutic targets for a variety of disorders. A new type of research tool will be developed and commercialized that is specialized for high-throughput, detailed, and long-term neural measurements in behaving mice and rats. This tool is a miniature computer that records electrophysiological signals from 64 sites in the brain and logs the data onto a Micro SD card. The system will weigh less than four grams and be carried by animals as small as mice. It can be deployed in diverse behavioral environments at high-throughput scale for a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. The tool will also contain polymer-based neural probe technology for long term electrophysiology recordings that will enable researchers to track the progression of aberrant ensemble spiking activity as diseases progress over long time periods. These probes are ultra-flexible and integrate well into neural tissue, permitting stable and high-quality spike recordings for over 6 months. By enabling high-throughput and long-term recordings, this tool provides a practical way to study the progression of circuit dysfunction using large cohorts of animal disease models.
This projects aims to catalyze the discovery of new treatments for psychiatric disorders by enabling researchers to study such diseases on the level of neural spiking activity in complex interconnected circuits. A research tool will be commercialized that addresses two major needs involving chronic ?in vivo electrophysiology in rodent models of disease: 1) long term recording stability to track disease progression, and 2) practical system scalability for high-throughput research using large animal cohorts.
