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ElectRx Has the Nerve to Envision Revolutionary Therapies for Self-Healing

Many chronic inflammatory diseases and mental health conditions affecting military Service members and veterans involve abnormal activity in the peripheral nervous system, which plays a key role in organ function. Monitoring and targeted regulation of peripheral nerve signals offer great promise to help patients restore and maintain their health without surgery or drugs. Current neuromodulation devices are typically used as a last resort, however, because they are relatively large (about the size of a deck of cards), require invasive surgical implantation and often produce side effects due to their lack of precision. DARPA’s Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx) program is seeking innovative research proposals to help transform neuromodulation therapies from last resort to first choice for a wide range of diseases.

ElectRx (pronounced “electrics”) aims to develop groundbreaking technologies that would use the body’s innate neurophysiology to restore and maintain health. In support of the White House’s brain initiative, ElectRx also seeks to accelerate understanding of specific neural circuits and their role in health and disease. Future therapies based on targeted peripheral neural stimulation could promote self-healing, reduce dependence on traditional drugs and provide new treatment options for illnesses.

ElectRx would leverage advanced sensing and stimulating technologies to target specific peripheral neural circuits that control organ functions. These feedback-controlled neuromodulation technologies would monitor health status and intervene as needed to deliver patient-specific therapeutic patterns of stimulation designed to restore a healthy physiological state. The program seeks to create ultraminiaturized devices that would require only minimally invasive insertion procedures such as injectable delivery through a needle.

“Many chronic illnesses occur when the body’s natural neuroelectrical and biochemical rhythms are disrupted, like playing wrong notes in music,” said Doug Weber, DARPA program manager. “ElectRx seeks to understand what the ‘right notes’ are for each person and provide real-time treatment to help the patient achieve and enjoy a harmonious, healthy baseline. Peripheral neuromodulation therapies based on ElectRx research could help maximize the immunological, physical and mental health of military Service members and veterans.”

The scope of ElectRx’ research is peripheral neuromodulation treatments for inflammatory diseases (which include rheumatoid arthritis, systemic inflammatory response syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease) and mental health disorders (such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression). DARPA expects ElectRx proposers to identify a disease of interest to study and treat. The agency intends to determine overall program success based on advancement of minimally or non-invasive interface technology, the capability to target specific nerves without side effects, validation of biological input/output pathways, and potential for translating this knowledge into an integrated, closed-loop neural-visceral interface for monitoring and maintaining health.

To familiarize potential participants with the technical objectives of ElectRx, DARPA has scheduled a Proposers’ Day on Tuesday, December 16, 2014, at the Capitol Conference Center in Arlington, Va. Registration is closed. The DARPA Special Notice document announcing the Proposers’ Day and describing the specific capabilities sought is available at http://go.usa.gov/6zpW. The Broad Agency Announcement with full technical details on ElectRx is available at http://go.usa.gov/F88T.  For more information, please email [email protected].

ElectRx plans to explore two principal technical areas:

Technical Area 1 (TA1): Systems approaches to neurobiological discovery and closed-loop control of physiological status in vivo. Proposals should aim to elucidate the neurobiological foundations of the proposed disease target and use the new insights derived from the physiological studies to drive closed-loop neuromodulation system design and implementation. These efforts should culminate with in vivo demonstrations of predictable and automatic restoration of healthy physiological states in response to on-board physiological state monitoring.

Albert Goldbarth, ”The Sciences Sing a Lullabye” (via wordsnquotes)

Submission from andrewtwist90

A while ago, various medblrs were sharing low grades they’d gotten to help show that it’s not the end of the world if you have a C on your transcript. Now that I’ve been accepted to med school, too, I wanted to show you my grades, because I am the poster girl for “a C won’t keep you from going to medical school.” 

It’s worth noting that I’m a post-bacc student, so I have a lot more grades in general than your average undergrad. It’s also true that my Cs (and that one D) weren’t in my post-bacc classes. But it seems to me that many pre-med students find it hard to believe that someone with these grades in any class could be accepted, and unnecessarily beat up on themselves if they have even one or two low grades. (And I included those B minuses above precisely because even a B- can feel like the end of the world to a pre-med sometimes.)

in case anyone is convinced this is an anomaly, I had a brief look at a copy of my transcripts, and here’s what it looked like for me at the time I applied:

I went the grad school route before I applied because I thought there was a possibility that research would be my thing. Turns out I was wrong, but that’s why I have so many classes here.

Having a range of grades instead of all As and Bs is not the end of the world, folks. As noted in the picture, half my prereqs had grades in the C- to C+ range.

Grades are only one facet of the application process. 

is it obvious that I was in undergrad for a long time?