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.