TU Delft & Prof. Dirk De Ridder — Bimodal Stimulation Device for Treating Tinnitus

Any update here? Does somebody know when they are going to start clinical trials?

 

Can someone who speaks Dutch contact TU Delft asking for an update?

http://microelectronics.tudelft.nl/People/bio.php?id=4

 

I spoke to Professor De Ridder about this on the 1st of August. It is on hold until he returns to Europe from New Zealand. I don’t know when that is.

 

Hi Padraigh!

Thank you for the information. On hold... mhhhh ok, I hope it is not cancelled. They try to target the DCN via vagus nerve stimulation. I hope it’s based on some former data and is not like a first experiment.

 

To be completely honest, he really kind of brushed off the question a little and was very casual about it.

The document itself is excellent reading and they are strangely enough running a Lenire TENT-3A trial in Bra3in at the moment.

I find it confusing that Lenire would allow this if Prof. De Ridder was an active competitor with this TU Delft Device.

To be honest, in general I find Prof. De Ridder a nice guy, who doesn't want to discuss research that much in his 'clinics'.

It was all I wanted to talk about as the various drug cocktails that have worked for some of his patients don't appeal to me.

A four drug cocktail of very low doses of various drugs has given 20% of patients a reduction. Some a 50% reduction but again nothing in a clinical trial or a paper so not touching it.

That is the issue with Prof. De Ridder. Lots of theories and ideas plus detailed papers but nothing tangible in a clinical trial environment yet.

We shall wait to see what Dr. Shore produces in her 100 patient trial. Fair dues to her for actually getting the trial done.

 

Don't forget this is a Master's thesis written by a student. Not the work of a respected Professor, not an entire scientific lab dedicated to the human hearing organ. It is not a scientific or published paper. I didn't read the entire paper, actually stopped when I saw thesis for graduation.

You will need a lot more resources AND funding to make this viable. Does not mean it is not a good idea/thesis though. I know TU Delft has the power to push through innovation (e.g. with aeroplanes etc), but we have seen how long it takes Susan Shore from idea to workable prototype. And she has a team of PhD's, funding etc.

 

1 year delay according to the Brai3n clinic. This is pretty disappointing.

 

Recent news about the Delft device. It concerns a Dutch investment group that has donated 5,000 euros to this particular project. Another interesting point in this article is that the device will focus on ''noisy galvanic stimulation'', which is completely new to me.

Here's the article, which I've translated to English:

The TinnitusFree Foundation receives a donation for a multimodal stimulation device

TMI Investments is donating €5,000 for the research of a new multimodal stimulation device for the treatment of tinnitus.

The TinnitusFree Foundation donates five thousand euros to the research of Prof. Dirk de Ridder of the BRAI3N center in Ghent and University of Otago and Prof. Wouter Serdijn of TU Delft.

The idea is to create a device that stimulates tinnitus of patients through the skin by means of a slowly alternating direct current stimulation during which different types of sound are superimposed. This “noisy galvanic stimulation” will be used to stimulate the vestibule, somatosensory cortex and auditory cortex, accompanied by external stimuli, such as sound and images.

Source: https://tmi.investments/stichting-tinnitusfree-ontvangt-donatie-voor-multimodaal-stimulatieapparaat/

 

5000€ donation? Are they serious? If they had received 500 000€, I would have been very happy. 5000€ is an absolutely ridiculous amount.

 

@EDDTEKK, I thought that. It could just be they ran short on funds and had to pause things. It may allow a month or two of work.

 

Oh wow, a whopping five grand, inflation unaccounted for! Some people are comedians. Stop, it's not funny!

 

This is why we don't get anywhere. Seriously how on earth aren't our military and government picking this up.

 

This is a big question that Dr. Shore brought up in one of her lectures. I think it was 10 years ago, she pointed out that the US gov pays a billion in disability payments to vets each year for tinnitus.

It seems all governments should be investing in this at rates much higher than 5K euros, because any breakthrough would save them a great deal of money. It would take a lot of vets off disability and put them back into the workforce.

We need someone to make friends with Gates, Bezos, Musk, or some other billionaire. I can only imagine what would happen in a single year with 500 million of funding that focused specifically on a treatment to get all of our brains to shut off this stupid noise. Not going after the holy grail of restoring hearing, but just focusing on developing a pill or device to stop the hiss.

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it is that humans, if motivated, can globally come together to solve some difficult problems quickly. Money and streamlining the testing phases brought about not just one vaccine but multiple vaccines. I have little doubt that a treatment is possible for us, restoring hearing feels far away even with funding, but stopping the hiss feels like a reasonable goal.

Not to mention that any successful treatment will make hundreds of millions over-night. Even if the treatment/device was sold at a low margin, the line at every treatment clinic would be around the block in every city in the world. Why isn't pharma investing more in Shore, Ridder, and others?

The lack of funding is disappointing, but academics aren't marketers and they aren't salesmen. I don't think the world always fully appreciates academia and the interesting/important research being conducted by Ridder or Shore or that PhD student who did the AI thing to show tinnitus.

 

I don't think Bill Gates could care any less about a 'champagne problem' like tinnitus.

 

I can't imagine Gates, Bezos, and Musk in the same room together. The three are arch enemies.

 

Update:

Squeaking, humming, buzzing. The discomfort of tinnitus

What did you find out from the survey?
“It has pointed us towards solutions which would make sense for users. For instance, we are currently working on a small device that can stimulate the vagus nerve through pulses of electricity through the skin.”

Should I think of an electrical stimulation that reduces tinnitus?
“Yes, that's right. We had one graduate student work on that and we will put a second one to work on it. We expect to test the effectiveness within a few months at BRAI3N clinic in Ghent, Belgium. The remedy is a combination of the electrical stimulation of a nerve and acoustic stimulation. It turns out, and there have been scientific studies on this, that if you give multimodal stimulation such as electric and acoustic signals at the same time, it increases the learning capacity of the brain. We want to teach the brain how to reconfigure itself. The brains of patients have organised themselves in a way that produces tinnitus, so we want to instruct them to start organising themselves differently. Not the whole brain, just the auditory cortex. Hence the combination of sound stimulation and electrical stimulation.”

What does that look like in practice?
“For now, this is still done with headphones and a sticker with electrodes. This allows us to test 20 patients in Ghent without any problem. But if you can reduce the equipment to an earpiece, there will be manufacturers of portable audio devices that will be very interested in it.”

 

Another "Michigan" device?

 

The more, the better.

 

New online lecture featuring Dr. De Ridder. He talks about the evolution of research & (future) interventions for the treatment of tinnitus. The most interesting part about a future intervention starts at 08:36, when he talks about a certain approach that he want to apply at his Brai3n clinic.

 

I watched that live. He talked about combination treatments being better than unipolar. That seemed the main theme. Other than that, he seemed to be implying there is too much distance between research and the clinic.

 

Any recent news about this study?

 

I want to know where this treatment currently stands. I trust Dr. Ridder, so I'm very interested in knowing what we can do to help. He's a smart guy.

 

I've sent Professor Serdijn an email yesterday about the current status of the TU Delft device. Hopefully we'll hear from him soon enough.

 

So I've just got an email from Professor Serdijn.

Professor Serdijn confirms that they've developed a prototype of the TU Delft device. He plans to demonstrate it next month at the Brai3n clinic. Professor De Ridder will also attend this demonstration. If all goes well, they will start with clinical trials.

 

From reading the thesis, this looks like Auricle.

 

Hi everyone,

I tried contacting Prof. Serdijn / Brai3n clinic about the current status, but I haven't received a reply so far.

However, I did discover a podcast (Universiteit van Nederland/ University of the Netherlands) in which Prof. Serdijn talks about tinnitus and why he is working with a team at TU Delft to develop a bi-modal device for tinnitus. This session has been recently recorded.

For Dutch speakers, you can listen to the podcast here.

I also made a summary for non-Dutch speakers.

Summary
Prof. Serdijn has a mild form of tinnitus. He can't accept the situation that patients get to hear from an ENT that there's no solution for tinnitus. Therefore, Prof. Serdijn aims to make a contribution as an electronic-technological engineer by co-creating a device that effectively treats tinnitus.

In the podcast, he briefly discusses the various causes of tinnitus, how it manifests in the brain, and the potential of electronic neuromodulation in reducing its severity.

The most intriguing part is at the end of the podcast, where he mentions he's developing a bi-modal electronic device for tinnitus and hopes it will soon be tested in a clinical setting.

 

Thank you so much for sharing @Christiaan. I am sorry if my question comes off rhetorical or weird, but just trying to understand what he is saying as far as testing in a clinical setting. Do you think this means having it trialed at Brai3n clinic with patients to see how it goes, or setting up a formal clinical trial with the device?

 

Thanks for this. The past couple of years I've been working and re-working a layman's model about what I believe tinnitus might be. Many of the terms we hear along the way have informed that thought process but the main one I keep returning to is, voltage gating.

Although I still need to make a final post about all this, I've often felt it'd be really interesting to eventually get feedback from someone within the tinnitus sphere who is actually an electronic-technological engineer. Maybe Prof. Serdijn could be that person.

 

One thing I have noticed about Dr. Dirk De Ridder is there seems to be no long drawn-out process in getting devices in clinical trials quickly established in his clinic. No talk of approval process or anything. Look at the myriad of electrical and magnetic stimulation devices he has in his clinic.

I actually thought TU Delft was already in the clinical trial stage at Brai3n. I would expect to see that device in his clinic in 12-18 months if it is successful in the clinical trial.

As someone in the UK, I have put the Michigan device on the backburner to 2026-2028. When Dr. Shore said they are not pursuing CE approval until it is established in the USA, I switched off. My only interest will be seeing how American folk get on with it.

 

No, it's a good question: in this podcast, Prof. Serdijn says that he wants to test it in a tinnitus clinic. Since we don't have a tinnitus clinic in the Netherlands where they have a know-how for applying electronic neuromodulation, it seems, to me at least, highly likely that he's talking about the Brai3n clinic. It's still an assumption, but I think this is the most likely scenario since Prof. Serdijn has had talks with Dr. De Ridder and his team last September about the workings of the TU Delft device.

I can't say that the Brai3n clinic will allow patients to use the device without adhering to formal clinical procedures (treatment vs. placebo, etc.). It's best to contact Brai3n once we know if they want to begin a trial with this device or not.

It never hurts to contact Prof. Serdijn via email. You can find his contact details on this site.

I may be to blame for the miscommunication about the clinical trial stage. I apologise for the confusion. I posted about my mistake in this thread.