Widely available noninvasive brain scans for early detection of neurological disease. A visual prosthesis in the form of glasses that returns sight to people with previously incurable vision loss. Malone researchers are associated with these two boundary-pushing proposals funded in this year’s cycle of the Johns Hopkins University’s SURPASS initiative.

Launched in 2022, the SURPASS program—a joint effort between the university’s Whiting School of Engineering in Baltimore and the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland—aims to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems and overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges.

“The four final SURPASS proposal teams demonstrated remarkable promise to take their research to the next level, and have been awarded funding to help realize this potential,” says Ed Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School. “These proposals have the potential to lead to even larger translational efforts that have the potential to bring enormous benefit to people and society.”

“The projects selected for this cycle are focused on bold new technologies,” adds APL Director Ralph Semmel. “The innovative partnerships between APL and the Whiting School are inspiring both for our researchers and for the promise they hold to improve the lives of people around the world.”

The program’s second call for proposals garnered 36 white paper submissions, five of which were selected to be developed into full proposals. Ultimately, SURPASS awarded funding to four teams, providing a total of approximately $3.75 million across the selected teams for 18 months of performance. Three of these teams are continuing work from the program’s first cycle, based on the progress they’ve already made and the high potential of their work.

Each proposal is led by two principal investigators, one from APL and the other from WSE. SURPASS leverages WSE’s and APL’s technical strengths and research and development communities, supporting cross-divisional teams dedicated to using innovative, multidisciplinary approaches. The program pulls in experts from across JHU, including the university’s School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Additionally, SURPASS partners with APL’s Research and Exploratory Development Mission Area, which serves as a transition agent, assisting with exposing SURPASS technologies more broadly.

Learn more about two of the teams selected to receive funding:

Organoid Intelligence: Synthetic Biological AI

Malone affiliate Brian Caffo, a professor of biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, is one of the researchers on the team.

Our understanding of biological intelligence is still in its infancy, and the same might be said of AI. Integrating both into a single system holds the promise to dramatically improve our understanding of each and potentially produce a quantum leap in computing as we know it.

The Organoid Intelligence team is pioneering the use of brain organoids—3D cell culture models that are grown from adult human stem cells and mimic certain structural and functional properties of specific regions of the brain. Doing this will allow the team to gain insight into the emergence of intelligence in biological neural networks.

The OI team has made considerable progress with its first round of SURPASS funding. The team has created a prototype system for OI experiments, new methods for electrically stimulating and recording activity in organoids, innovative microfluidic devices to maintain the health and stability of the cell cultures, and novel machine learning and AI tasks to test these systems.

All of this has laid the groundwork for an even more impressive showing in the second round.

“The work we did in the first round of SURPASS has really set us up to advance discovery by growing larger organoids and developing more testing modalities and tasks to gain deeper insight into how these systems work,” says co-PI Thomas Hartung, the Doerenkamp-Zbinden Chair and a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering.

“In the new cycle, I would like to increase the complexity of the model by introducing more regions of the brain involved in learning and reward processing,” says Lena Smirnova, an assistant professor of environmental health and engineering and a member of the OI team.

“We’ve done some experiments to help us understand the mechanisms of long-term learning in these brain organoids—how the synapses change their connectivity strength in response to performing a task, which is one of the basic mechanisms of learning,” says co-PI Erik C. Johnson, an APL senior research scientist. “We’re also developing new interfaces and microfluidic systems that can work with the complex 3D cell cultures we’re creating and overcome the limitations of commercially available 2D systems.”

Beyond the scope of the second stage of SURPASS, he adds, the team will also formalize protocols for ensuring ethical oversight of this work.

The Photoacoustic Retinal Prosthesis team.

The Photoacoustic Retinal Prosthesis team, from top left: James Spicer (WSE), Hyunwoo Song (WSE), Jeeun Kang (WSE), Jin Kang (WSE), Wayne Rogers (WSE), David Shrekenhamer (APL), Emad Boctor (co-principal investigator, WSE), Luke Currano (APL), Seth Billings (co-principal investigator, APL), Yannis Paulus (SOM), Jacalynn Sharp (APL), Alexandra Patterson (WSE), Chad Weiler (APL), Christopher Stiles (APL), and Erika Rashka (APL). Not pictured: Maomao Chen (SOM), Bree Christie (APL), George Coles (APL), Peter Gehlbach (SOM, WSE), Thomas Johnson (SOM), Dominique Meyer (WSE), Van Phuc Nguyen (SOM), Francesco Tenore (APL), Ji Yi (WSE), Don Zack (SOM), and Mi Zheng (SOM). Image Credit: Johns Hopkins APL / Justin Gladden

Photoacoustic Retinal Prosthesis: A New Paradigm for Prosthetic Vision

Malone affiliate Emad Boctor, the director of the Medical UltraSound Imaging and Intervention Collaboration Laboratory, leads this project with co-PI Seth Billings.

Around 3 million Americans today suffer from irreversible degenerative vision disorders—a figure that is set to double by 2050. The team behind the “Photoacoustic Retinal Prosthesis” project hopes to provide a viable treatment option for individuals suffering from blindness or severe vision loss due to incurable disorders of the outer retina.

To do that, they’re harnessing the power of the photoacoustic effect, a physical phenomenon used in a variety of scientific applications whereby a material absorbs light, heats up, and rapidly expands, generating pressure waves that then propagate as ultrasound. The team’s patented approach—known as photoacoustic retinal stimulation, or PARS—involves using a focused nanosecond pulsed laser to irradiate an implant material to produce ultrasound waves. These waves then stimulate activity within the residual neurons of the inner retina that are responsible for vision. In contrast to existing vision-restoration devices, which require implanting an invasive, active device onto the retina, this approach uses a passive implant that would be stimulated by a wearable device in an eyeglasses form factor.

In its first phase of research under last year’s SURPASS program, the team developed a prototype test device and completed proof-of-concept experiments demonstrating its ability to successfully stimulate activity in retinal neurons.

As the researchers continue their work this year, they’re focused on maturing their technology to improve performance and expand the domain of retinal disorders that could be alleviated with the device, continuing biological studies to further characterize the safety and efficacy of the prototype and optimizing their approach through further experiments.

“No one person or small team can have all of the knowledge and experience that’s required to accomplish something like this,” says co-PI Seth Billings, an APL senior staff scientist. “It takes all of the different divisions of Johns Hopkins coming together.”

Excerpted from the APL website >>