Stanford University

Excitable cells are the biological building blocks of brain, heart and muscle, and communicate and compute using tiny, transient electrical currents. Widespread throughout the body, these cells underlie remarkable behaviors, from orchestration of movement to high-level cognition. When they malfunction, these cells give rise to devastating diseases, ranging from heart failure to Parkinson’s disease to depression; however, the interventional tools currently available to deal with these conditions are exceedingly primitive, have severe side effects, and yield little or no understanding of healthy cells or of disease processes. New technology is required, powerful enough to address the high speed and structural complexity of these electrical tissues. This grant is for a four-year project to address this fundamental obstacle by developing and applying emerging optical technologies first developed at Stanford. This light-based bioengineering approach has the power to control cellular functioning in vivo with millisecond precision, and to control intracellular messengers in specific cell types, thereby opening new vistas of both investigation and healing. The project personnel will develop the science and technology of this approach and apply these tools for the first time to mammalian models of neurological, neuropsychiatric and cardiac disease, spanning the central, peripheral and autonomic nervous systems.