Abstract
Retinal prostheses that seek to restore vision by artificially stimulating retinal neurons with electrical current are an emerging treatment for photoreceptor degenerative diseases but face difficulties achieving naturalistic vision with high spatial resolution. Here, we report the unexpected discovery of a technique for mechanically stimulating retinal neurons with the potential to bypass the limitations of electrical stimulation. We found that pulsatile injections of standard Ames medium solution into explanted retinas of wild type rats under certain injection conditions (pulse-width > 50ms at 0.69 kPa pressure) elicit spatially localized retinal responses similar to light-evoked responses. The same injections made into photoreceptor degenerated retinas of transgenic S334ter-3 rats also elicit robust neural responses. We investigated the cellular mechanism causing these responses, by repeating the injections after treating the retinas with a pharmacological blocker of the transient receptor potential vanilloid (TRPV) channel group, a common mechanoreceptor found on retinal neurons, and observed a significant reduction in retinal ganglion cell spike rate response amplitudes. Together, these data reveal that therapeutic mechanical stimulation of the retina, occurring in part through TRPV channel activation, is feasible and this little explored neurostimulation paradigm could be useful in stimulating photoreceptor degenerated retinas for vision restoration.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1075-1083 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering |
Volume | 26 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 2018 |
Funding
Manuscript received October 18, 2017; revised March 8, 2018; accepted March 27, 2018. Date of publication April 2, 2018; date of current version May 8, 2018. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation Program under Grant 0938072. The contents of this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF. (Corresponding author: Laxman Saggere.) C. M. Rountree is with the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607 USA.
Keywords
- Mechanical stimulation
- TRPV channel
- artificial vision
- mechanoreceptor
- neurostimulation
- retina
- visual prosthesis
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Internal Medicine
- General Neuroscience
- Biomedical Engineering
- Rehabilitation