A scalable system for high throughput, chronic electrophysiology in translational rodent research

Psychiatric disorders give rise to aberrant patterns of activity within the complex neural circuits
of our brainsYetthe exact nature of these abnormal patterns is often unknown to developers
of new treatmentsThe goal of this project is to enable circuit oriented research of
neuropsychiatric diseases using rodent disease modelsThe long term objective is to catalyze
the discovery of new therapeutic targets for a variety of disordersA new type of research tool
will be developed and commercialized that is specialized for high throughputdetailedand
long term neural measurements in behaving mice and ratsThis tool is a miniature computer
that records electrophysiological signals fromsites in the brain and logs the data onto a
Micro SD cardThe system will weigh less than four grams and be carried by animals as small
as miceIt can be deployed in diverse behavioral environments at high throughput scale for a
fraction of the cost of traditional systemsThe tool will also contain polymer based neural probe
technology for long term electrophysiology recordings that will enable researchers to track the
progression of aberrant ensemble spiking activity as diseases progress over long time periodsThese probes are ultra flexible and integrate well into neural tissuepermitting stable and
high quality spike recordings for overmonthsBy enabling high throughput and long term
recordingsthis tool provides a practical way to study the progression of circuit dysfunction
using large cohorts of animal disease models This projects aims to catalyze the discovery of new treatments for psychiatric disorders by
enabling researchers to study such diseases on the level of neural spiking activity in complex
interconnected circuitsA research tool will be commercialized that addresses two major needs
involving chronicin vivo electrophysiology in rodent models of diseaselong term recording
stability to track disease progressionandpractical system scalability for high throughput
research using large animal cohorts