Research Initiation Awards provide support for faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building a research program. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at his home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to North Carolina A&T State University has potential broader and societal impact in a number of areas. The project focuses on developing a mathematical model to understand the mechanisms underlying deep brain stimulation, a therapy used in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. Undergraduate students as well as high school students will gain research experiences.
The effectiveness of deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease has been linked to the destruction of pathological rhythmicity in basal ganglia. To find a more effective deep brain stimulation procedure, it is crucial to use appropriate neuronal network models that are able to produce intermittently synchronized oscillatory dynamics observed in parkinsonian patients. As the only excitatory nucleus in the basal ganglia, the subthalamic nucleus plays an important role in the dynamics of basal ganglia and is a standard target for deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease. Recent experiments have identified a set of ionic currents that are responsible for various rhythmic bursting patterns in subthalamic nucleus neurons. This research will develop a new computational model for the subthalamic nucleus that comprises key currents and then set up network models, namely an updated basal ganglia network model and an extended cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus model. By performing numerical and mathematical analyses, the research will study how intrinsic neuronal properties and network properties in basal ganglia incorporate to generate intermittently synchronized rhythms. This project will enhance the understanding of the mechanisms underlying pathological rhythms in parkinsonian basal ganglia and deep brain stimulation procedures. The research may also lead to the discovery of more effective methods to break the intermittently synchronized rhythms in parkinsonian states with a minimal amount of stimulation intervention.
