Scientists in Chicago Remotely Controlled a Wireless Brain Implant in South Korea

Researchers demonstrated that a brain implant halfway around the world can be operated over the internet with almost no lag. Commands sent from Chicago travelled 6,584 miles (10,596 kilometres) to a computer in Daejeon, South Korea. From there they went wirelessly to an implant inside a freely moving rat, with an average response time of about 109 milliseconds, according to a study published in Science Advances.

The device, called RAPIDO, was developed by teams at KAIST (the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and Yonsei University, led by KAIST electrical engineer Jae-Woong Jeong. Once implanted, it can perform two separate functions — releasing a substance through a tiny channel and emitting light from a miniature LED — each controllable individually and schedulable in advance online. Jeong told ScienceAlert that remote operation "makes it possible to conduct longitudinal experiments with less direct intervention and reduced influence from experimenter presence."

The team tested RAPIDO in two rat studies. In the first, the implant delivered different doses of cocaine into the nucleus accumbens, a brain region tied to reward, and the rats' movement changed in ways that tracked the dose. That effect was reproduced two, three and four weeks after implantation. In the second, an optogenetics test, the researchers injected cocaine into the rats' abdomens rather than through the implant, so they could isolate the effect of light alone. Rats given cocaine without light later preferred the compartment associated with the drug, but that preference did not appear in rats whose implants activated the RhoA signalling pathway during conditioning.

RAPIDO extends earlier wireless-implant work, including smartphone-controlled systems Jeong helped develop for mice, by combining refillable drug delivery, targeted light stimulation, programmable dosing and internet-based control on one platform. The researchers did not test the implant in humans or demonstrate a treatment for cocaine addiction. Jeong said the biggest challenge for any future clinical use "is demonstrating long-term safety and reliability in the human brain."