Professor Alexander Zestos’s Brain Sensors Headed for the Marketplace
Groundbreaking discoveries in the field of neuroscience are giving researchers dramatic new insights into how the human brain works. One of the ways they are making these breakthroughs is with new brain sensors like those designed by Alexander Zestos, bioanalytical chemist and American University professor of chemistry.
Zestos has teamed up with biotech company Spike Neuro, backed by a $988,054 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), to bring his sensors to market. The tiny sensors — no bigger than a human hair — act as probes to measure real-time changes in brain neurotransmitter levels—such as dopamine and serotonin—by measuring their electrochemical response. They hold great promise for helping researchers understand more about how the brain functions across critical areas of neuroscience, like how drugs affect different brain regions, how diseases like dementia progress, and why some people become addicts or suffer from depression.
Synergy Across Academia and Industry
The partnership first took shape at a 2022 NIH-sponsored neurotech conference that brought together scientists, academics, and leaders from industries such as pharmaceuticals and medical instrumentation. At the event, Zestos met Spike Neuro's chief operating officer and chief medical officer, and they identified a strong alignment in their goals—a collaboration to bring Zestos's sensors to the wider marketplace.
Zestos’s sensors solve many challenges currently facing researchers. They will be commercially available and arrive fully assembled. They are suitable for neurochemical measurements. They feature a new electrode material—silicon carbide—that will be developed with Spike Neuro. The probes will be customizable in terms of size, length, and spacing to target specific brain regions, accommodating the diverse needs of researchers studying different areas of the brain. They also feature multiple nodes, allowing researchers to measure neurotransmitter levels in different parts of the brain at the same time. And they are relatively tiny, making them minimally invasive for brain use.
Commercial Applications
Zestos says the sensors are a critically important tool to help researchers understand complex neurological disorders, drug effects, and behaviors. “For example, the measurement of dopamine is critical in understanding behaviors such learning, motivation, movement disorders (Parkinson’s Disease), pleasure, reward, and the effect of drugs of abuse such as psychostimulants, opioids, and others. Serotonin helps regulate mood and is crucial to understanding depression. Others include adenosine, which is cardio and neuroprotective for heart disease and stroke, while glutamate and GABA are the excitatory and inhibitors neurotransmitters that are biomarkers for epileptic seizures.”
Zestos’s devices are expected to become useful tools for physician scientists, academics, pharmaceutical and government researchers to measure these neurochemicals for a wide variety of applications. Customization is critical, he says. “The brain is very heterogeneous, which makes the development of novel tools to study different regions of the brain important” he explains. “We want to configure the probes to customize the dimensions such as the size, the length, and the spacing specific to the brain regions that each researcher wants to study. This is not a one-size-fits-all problem. Different neuroscientists are interested in measuring different neurochemicals in different areas of the brain. Our probes are small, they're fast, they're biocompatible, they're minimally invasive, and they can measure different brain regions simultaneously.”
A Perfect Fit
Zestos first got interested in carbon fiber microelectrodes during his time earning his PhD at the University of Virginia. He was interested in human health and knew he wanted to work in the laboratory. “I had a strong mathematics and physical science background. I was interested in biomedical science, medicine, and analytical science, and this work combined all my research interests,” he says. “I could think critically and analytically. I could use math and physics skills and apply them toward medicine and biomedical research. I knew that there was an engineering aspect on top of this, because we were really limited by the [existing] technologies. Finally, I felt that there was a great need in making novel tools and technologies to expand this to help further understand brain science.”
Zestos is excited by the possibilities ahead, but the work is complex. “It includes developing novel conductive carbon coatings and contacts that will be used for the neurochemical measurement,” he says. “Moreover, I will need to interface it with commercially available and custom-made multichannel potentiostat instrumentation to interface these electrodes to computers and software that will enable data collection and analysis.” After this, Zestos and Spike Neuro will conduct in vitro testing, followed by ex vivo measurements in brain slices, and then measure the stimulated release of neurotransmitters in vivo in animals.
The ultimate goal is to someday develop a device that could be used in humans, which will eventually include clinical trials and safety and efficacy testing with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “Our understanding of the brain and nervous system is limited by the technologies currently available to study them,” says Zestos, “which is why novel tools and assays are needed and critical towards making groundbreaking discoveries in the field of neuroscience.”