Journal Club: Restoring a Reflex

In a healthy person, your body automatically adjusts blood pressure constantly, and this adjustment is governed by what’s called the baroreflex. However, a spinal cord injury can disrupt this reflex, which has both short term consequences, like passing out, but also long term consequences like an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, host Lauren Richardson is joined by Dr. Aaron Phillips of the University of Calgary to talk about his lab’s work to reinstate this reflex in patients after a spinal cord injury using a neuroprosthetic device. This device both senses blood pressure changes and then activates the necessary neuronal structures to restore the connection to the blood vessels. We discuss how his group determined which neuronal structures to stimulate, how they developed this medical device, and the exciting results from their studies in rats, non-human primates and humans.

Aaron Phillips, CEP, MSc, PhD (Medicine), Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, joins host Lauren Richardson to discuss the results and implications of the article "Neuroprosthetic baroreflex controls haemodynamics after spinal cord injury" by Jordan W. Squair, Matthieu Gautier, Lois Mahe, Jan Elaine Soriano, Andreas Rowald, Arnaud Bichat, Newton Cho, Mark A. Anderson, Nicholas D. James, Jerome Gandar, Anthony V. Incognito, Giuseppe Schiavone, Zoe K. Sarafis, Achilleas Laskaratos, Kay Bartholdi, Robin Demesmaeker, Salif Komi, Charlotte Moerman, Bita Vaseghi, Berkeley Scott, Ryan Rosentreter, Claudia Kathe, Jimmy Ravier, Laura McCracken, Xiaoyang Kang, Nicolas Vachicouras, Florian Fallegger, Ileana Jelescu, YunLong Cheng, Qin Li, Rik Buschman, Nicolas Buse, Tim Denison, Sean Dukelow, Rebecca Charbonneau, Ian Rigby, Steven K. Boyd, Philip J. Millar, Eduardo Martin Moraud, Marco Capogrosso, Fabien B. Wagner, Quentin Barraud, Erwan Bezard, Stéphanie P. Lacour, Jocelyne Bloch, Grégoire Courtine & Aaron A. Phillips, published in Nature.