Medtronic plc obtained the CE mark for its Sensight directional lead system for deep brain stimulation (DBS) for movement disorders and epilepsy, which is designed to be used with the company’s Percept PC DBS device. Percept received U.S. FDA clearance in June 2020 and CE mark in January 2020.

COVID-19 continues to dramatically reconfigure medicine as an ever-broadening array of digital therapies rolls out and telemedicine tackles increasingly complex applications. Abbott Laboratories’ newly launched Neurosphere Virtual Clinic exploits both trends to make management of chronic pain and movement disorders easier for patients.

TORONTO – The University of Toronto (U of T) is collaborating with Kawasaki, Japan’s Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. to dramatically streamline radiation treatment plans for Gamma Knife brain tumor radiosurgery. Together, they are leveraging Fujitsu's Digital Annealer described as quantum-inspired computing technology to create treatment plans for complex surgical procedures in minutes, while maintaining accuracy and minimizing dosage to surrounding healthy tissue.

LONDON – New research shows it is possible to diagnose Parkinson’s disease by mass spectrometry analysis of sebum samples taken with a simple skin swab, and that the same technique has potential to be used for diagnosing COVID-19. In a paper published in Nature Communications on March 11, 2021, scientists and clinicians in the U.K. and the Netherlands describe using high resolution mass spectrometry to profile the chemical signature of lipids and other biomarkers in sebum from Parkinson’s patients and show how these exhibit subtle but fundamental changes as the disease progresses.

With the prevalence of central nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and stroke increasing annually, the need for novel therapeutics to treat neurologic and psychiatric disorders has never been greater. Unfortunately, even though there is a significant unmet medical need, because of the high risk and low approval rates of drugs targeting those devastating diseases, in the past decade big pharma companies have been dramatically reducing their R&D spending on CNS disorders, noted Naheed Kurji, president and CEO of Toronto-based Cyclica Inc.

TORONTO – Novel. Unique. Revolutionary. Terms too often used to indiscriminately describe medical devices that have yet to prove their stuff. Not so at France’s Ministry of Health which takes care to deem winning devices under its Forfait Innovation (FI) program “truly innovative, not simply incremental developments.” Last week the FI awarded Vancouver, British Columbia’s Evasc Neurovascular Inc. €2.76 million (US$3.37 million) to test its CE-marked Eclips for treating intracranial bifurcation aneurysms during a 119-patient trial at 20 French sites in 2021.