Diseases need treatments and innovative devices. Innovation may come from “happy luck”, also called serendipity, which is when an event crosses the view of a scientist and triggers possible solutions for an unsolved problem. This is what happened during a thalamotomy for essential tremor when, exploring the functional anatomy of the site to be coagulated, we unexpectedly observed that when stimulating at higher frequencies than the usual 30 Hz (i.e. 100 Hz or more) the tremor stopped, similar to after a lesion but this time in a reversible manner, which meant safety. This is how deep brain stimulation at high frequency was born and is used now worldwide as a surgical tool for functional neurosurgery for various indications, although the intimate mechanism is not yet deciphered.
On another side, to solve problems one needs to think about solutions which might ultimately differ from what was imagined at the beginning, particularly when the scientific knowledge didn't allow us to think that a particular solution could be easily developed. New technologies allowed the scientific and medical worlds during the last two decades to dare to aim at a goal which could be considered as expensive and impossible. This is how we started the project on a brain computer interface to help people unable to move because of tetraplegia still use their brain functions, have their brain data captured, processed and then transformed in orders, to animate devices such as a four limb exoskeleton.
On another side again, trying to cure diseases, which at the moment are only controlled symptomatically, by current or recent methods is difficult to achieve, particularly for neurodegenerative diseases. The knowledge that light might have beneficial, as well as deleterious, effects on living tissues, and that wavelengths in the near infrared range might penetrate through tens of millimeters in tissues, particularly in the brain, could lead to the step-by-step development of a totally new treatment for Parkinson’s disease, aimed at slowing down or arresting the neuronal degenerative process occurring in the nigral dopaminergic cells. Designing a device able to deliver light in a given place within the brain and proving through animal experimental research that this could be efficient and technically usable to improve the toxic symptoms of MPTP animals, we have paved the way to starting a therapeutic clinical trial in human.
Difficulties in these different types of projects are usually the enormous amount of money which is needed. There are also the difficulties created by those initially well intended but ultimately totally pernicious, various procedures, methods, regulations that have to be overcome or bypassed, before even starting the work that is needed to provide a solution which is first of all efficient and second reasonably safe in its application. Medical research in the next decades has to evolve from the “zero risk principle”, which is going to destroy everything under the pretext of reducing the risks, to the new concept of a “risk known, analyzed, and assumed”.