A Revolution in Prosthetics Building the most lifelike limbs ever imagined by Diane Ainsworth
Loeb photo by Brian Morri
Gerald Loeb
Loss of a limb is devastating to individuals and their families, and learning to use a prosthetic device may take years. Today’s prosthetic arms and legs, while impressive, provide a limited range of movement and only a primitive ability to grasp objects. But at Gerald Loeb’s Medical Device Development Facility in the basement of USC’s Denney Research Building, a hotbed of novel technologies promises to make new artificial limbs more lifelike than ever imagined. Loeb is the inventor of BIONs™, tiny injectable neurostimulators shaped like a grain of rice. BIONs™ activate weak and paralyzed muscles, bringing them back to life, but they are not the first bionic technology that he has developed. Loeb was also one of the inventors of the cochlear implant, used to restore hearing to the deaf. He started working on a visual prosthesis while still in medical school in the 1960s, an application now being pursued by Mark Humayun and colleagues in USC’s Engineering Research Center for Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems (BMES), where Loeb
is deputy director. BMES is uniquely focused on neural rehabilitation. Launched in 2003 as a collaboration between the Viterbi School and the Keck School of Medicine at USC, as well as UC-Santa Cruz, the center now has partnerships with 14 companies and 10 universities, including Caltech. “Bionic is the word Hollywood invented to explain the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ in the 1970s,” says Loeb with a smile. “But today, biomimetic systems are able to restore lost function to complex neural systems. We use them to restore the electrical signals that are normally sent out from the motor neurons to different parts of the body. Cochlear implants are the most successful biomimetic systems to date, but we hope to use similar biomimetic technology in retinal implants to restore partial vision, and in patients who are paralyzed from a stroke or suffering from memory loss.”
Industry Interest The Department of Defense is keen to develop this rehabilitative technology for soldiers who
have lost their arms or legs in combat. Consequently, Loeb’s lab in the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC has been named one of several major subcontractors in a $30.4-million contract for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to start Phase 1 of a program called “Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009.” The four-year program aims to develop a nextgeneration mechanical arm that will look, feel and behave just like one in the flesh. The contract grows out of an increasing number of U.S. soldiers who are losing their limbs in the Iraq War. Despite the many advances in body armor and helmets, more than 450 U.S. soldiers have lost an arm or leg in Iraq or Afghanistan. DARPA’s new prosthetics program is the first step in a long-term effort to give injured military personnel the most advanced medical and rehabilitative care possible. USC is part of the effort, which will be led by Stuart D. Harshbarger at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). An USC Viterbi Engineer
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