By Marie Guma-Diaz
UM News

Abhishek Prasad

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (October 22, 2015) — Abhishek Prasad, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, is a recipient of the 2015 New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his proposal involving spinal cord neural interface for neuroprosthetics. The award, providing $2.257 million over 5 years, will fund the study of the spinal cord motor circuits involved in limb movements and their viability for prosthetic control.

“The award will help us understand the information processing in the spinal cord and how this information can be exploited to provide more effective control of a neuroprostheses,” Prasad said. “The goal is to restore upper limb function in spinal cord injury (SCI) individuals and create a spinal cord-based test bed for evaluating new neural devices.”

The study provides an opportunity to deliver a unique neural interface—a communication channel between the nervous system and an external device—that can lead to the development of an assistive system for people with motor paralysis and promote development of a new neuroprosthetic design. The long-term goal of Prasad’s lab is to build brain and spinal cord machine interfaces to restore communication and control in paralyzed individuals.

The NIH New Innovator Award supports exceptionally creative new investigators who propose highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact. The award is part of the NIH Common Fund High-Risk, High-Reward Research program.

“This program has consistently produced research that revolutionized scientific fields by giving investigators the freedom to take risks and explore potentially groundbreaking concepts,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins. “We look forward to the remarkable advances in biomedical research the 2015 awardees will make.”

College of Engineering Dean Jean-Pierre Bardet concurs that Prasad’s research is in an area of extreme importance within the biomedical engineering field (namely, neural engineering) and one of the robust research areas within the College.

“Prasad’s grant recognizes both this project’s critical importance and the extraordinary progress in his research career,” Bardet said.

“This is well-deserved recognition of the exceptional work being done by Prasad,” said John L. Bixby, professor of pharmacology and neurological surgery at the Miller School of Medicine and vice provost for research at UM.

Prasad envisions the development of future hybrid therapies that combine a spinal cord neural interface with brain machine interfaces, functional electrical stimulation, rehabilitation, cell-based, and tissue-engineered approaches that can lead to improvements in motor performance and greater independence in individuals with spinal cord injury.

In addition to the current award, Prasad also received a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to build intelligent software for brain machine interfaces in 2013, the UM Provost Research Award in 2014, and the Department of Defense Discovery Award in 2015.