ONWARD Medical N.V., the medical technology company creating innovative therapies to restore movement, independence, and health in people with spinal cord injury (SCI), announced that the Company has been awarded a second grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) to support the enhancement of an innovative Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology for restoring mobility and upper limb function in people with spinal cord injury.
“Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain-spine interface.”
Under the EIC Pathfinder funding program, a grant of EUR 3.7 million has been awarded to ONWARD and its research partners, including EPFL and CEA-Clinatec.The project is entitled, “Auto-Adaptive Neuromorphic Brain Machine Interface: Toward Fully Embedded Neuroprosthetics.” Under the terms of the grant, ONWARD will receive EUR 1.0 million.
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The NEMO-BMI project will support usability improvements that enable the use of a BCI to support upper and lower limb movement. Auto-adaptive algorithms will be developed for brain decoding and brain-guided spinal cord stimulation patterns and will then be embedded in miniaturized hardware. The goal of the program is to further enhance the BCI technology to make it reliable, small, and easy to implant, as well as to improve the BCI’s usability and manufacturability.
The NEMO-BMI project has started and will complement the ongoing work of the Reverse Paralysis project, for which ONWARD and its research partners received an EIC grant of EUR 3.6 million in June 2022. These proceeds are being used to fund integration between ONWARD’s implanted ARC-IM system, which delivers targeted, programmed stimulation of the spinal cord, and Clinatec’s WIMAGINE, a fully implantable device approved for chronic use in clinical trials in two European countries, which records and decodes the brain’s cortical signal to predict a person’s desired movement intentions. While NEMO-BMI is a separate project from Reverse Paralysis, its goal is to build on the Reverse Paralysis framework and incorporate any improvements into the joint ONWARD-Clinatec BCI technology platform. The technology improvements developed in the NEMO-BMI project will be evaluated independently and then used in clinical trials as part of the Reverse Paralysis project.
SOURCE: Businesswire