The TinyBrains team meets in Amiens

As the TinyBrains project enters its third year, the team gathered for the first 2023 General Assembly in Amiens, in northern France. Fabrice Wallois, doctor and professor at the University of Amiens – Picardie welcomed everyone to the city.

The first day of the meeting was dedicated to summarising the progress made in each of the work packages and discussing the technical aspects. Project coordinator Turgut Durduran started the presentation by summarizing the advances of these two years, which have resulted in a prototype of the device. Postdoc researcher at ICFO Melih Can presented the developed hardware modules and the control unit for the synchronization of the three technologies that TinyBrains uses – DCS, fNIRS and EEG. So far, the TinyBrains platform can measure six parameters: the blood flow index, the cerebral tissue oxygenation, the electrophysiology, the cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen, the neurovascular coupling and the auto-regulation.

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Preparing for clinical trials

Before passing the ethical approvals and completing the model for the animal trials, the device has gone through a thorough testing process. BioPixS CEO Sanathana Konugolu explained the validation they have done using phantoms to provide the needed protocols for the future exploitation of the device. As researchers have recently started testing the TinyBrains platform in animals, clinician Joan Sánchez de Toledo explained the steps followed to build and validate the animal model setup, which will now allow them to study the effects of cardiopulmonary by-pass and hypoxic ischemia on brain injury. Neonatologist Marta Camprubí shared the advancements in both developing the clinical protocols and planning the clinical studies that will start in the second semester of 2023.

One step before that will be to validate the head cap by Amiens researchers. Fabrice Wallois summarized the plans and work done in the context of work package 6, which will characterize and analyse the neuronal and vascular network responses and interactions, in the context of surgery for congenital heart defects. As the main core of the work package will be developed after the first sets of data from the clinical trials are available, the group in Amiens has been researching the spontaneous activity of the neuronal and vascular network, before and after surgery. In this context, Prof. Sahar Moghimi explained their latest studies in the area and a clinical debate followed up, where researchers discussed the different EEG signals on patients during sleep and sedation, and in different medical conditions. Several researchers from the “Multimodal analysis of brain function” research group took the opportunity to present some of the group’s current activity.

Before the group dinner, which took place in a typical restaurant, Picardie researchers led the group on a guided tour of the neonatal ICU and their research laboratories.

Welcoming new members to the team

The meeting resumed the next morning with the project progress summary, given by the project manager at ICFO Judith Salvador. After reviewing the reach and scope that the project has had so far, in terms of communication and dissemination, the focus was shifted towards exploitation. Udo Weigel from HemoPhotonics gave the details on the market analysis and business plan, and partners debated about the specifications and potentialities of the TinyBrains platform.

The meeting also served as an opportunity to meet face-to-face with the new members that have joined the project in the last months: Prof. Sahar Moghimi and PhD student Ali Rajabi from the Université Picardie-Jules Verne, and Nishigandha Patil, a postdoc at ICFO.

The consortium agreed on fixing the date for the next meeting in the fall of 2023, where everyone will see each other in person again, in Barcelona.