Fusion — Disciplines — Science — 2014–15
2014–15 Scientific Focus
Advanced Applications for Networked Neuro Devices
The second year on the NNP platform, structured differently: each team began from a distinct clinical application and had to carry it the whole way.
Interdisciplinary teams worked in parallel to understand and cultivate product designs around CWRU's next-generation neuromodulation platform, the Networked Neuroprosthesis. Each team started from a different application — ranging from obesity to orthopaedics to vagus nerve applications — and built on an emerging understanding of the clinical and commercial opportunity that the NNP approach presented. Every concept was developed and evaluated for clinical application, intellectual property development, and a viable business case.
The Northern Ohio region carries a broad array of world-class research in neuromodulation, led by its academic research institutions and medical centers — the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland FES Center, and the Advanced Platform Technology Center — alongside a community of privately held enterprises including NDI Medical, Intelect Medical, Neuros Medical, and Synapse Biomedical.
P. Hunter Peckham again provided the scientific fundamentals of contemporary and emerging approaches to nerve stimulation systems, and helped students understand how the NNP platform had evolved. His work on the platform was the focus of a multi-million dollar commercialization program funded by the Ohio Third Frontier Commission with a broad array of commercial and research partners.
As in every Fusion cycle, the goal was to bring deep context to a scientific field by connecting with the experts, practitioners, and entrepreneurs who could give students a hands-on understanding of what actually goes wrong when promising technology meets a market.
Running a second year on the same technology tested something the program had not previously examined: whether the method produces genuinely different answers when different teams start from different applications of one platform. It did — which is itself a useful finding about platform commercialization.