Clinatec

Background

Professor Alim Louis Benabid and Jean Therme first met back in 2006.

Alim Louis Benabid is a neurosurgeon. Together with Professor Pierre Pollak, he developed a new treatment for Parkinson's disease, deep brain stimulation. His work received recognition in 2014 with the Lasker Award and in 2016 with the European Inventor Award.

Jean Therme is Director of Technological Research at CEA Grenoble. He has worked tirelessly to make Grenoble a key center of expertise in electronics and micro- and nanotechnology, and to encourage close collaboration between the worlds of research and industry.

Both men were convinced that millions of lives could be transformed by merging medical research and technology R&D. They agreed that the way to achieve this would be to bring together doctors, researchers, biologists, engineers, robotics engineers, mathematicians and knowledge engineers to work at a single site.

In 2010–11, the 6,000 m² building was built and equipped.

In 2013, the first patient was admitted to the center, in relation to the "Protool" clinical trial coordinated by Professor Berger. For the first time, it was possible to use non-invasive procedures to explore regions of the brain that had hitherto been inaccessible. The exciting prospects opened up by this technology, the result of the coupling of technology developed at CEA-Leti with the clinical approach taken by researchers at Grenoble-Alpes University Hospital (CHU), Inserm and the Université Grenoble Alpes, led to setting up the MedPrint start-up, which won an I-lab award in 2015.

In 2014, Clinatec launched a campaign to raise 30 million euros in order to develop a number of projects, including:

• the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) project aiming to prove that a quadriplegic patient can drive neuroprosthetic effectors with multiple degrees of freedom, such as an exoskeleton, based on decoding cortical signals (ElectroCorticoGrams) measured by a Wimagine implant, and can do this through training to make the most of their cerebral plasticity,
• and the Near InfraRed (NIR) project aiming to demonstrate that near-infrared light can have neuro-protective effects in treating Parkinson's disease.