Battling Chronic Pain with Noninvasive Focused Ultrasound

Chronic pain impacts an estimated 20% of the world population and persists as a frustrating symptom for innumerable health issues. As part of his lab’s committed focus to improving noninvasive technology solutions for human health, Bin He(opens in new window) of Carnegie Mellon University is developing noninvasive neuromodulation strategies to serve as an alternative to pharmaceuticals for combating chronic pain. In a promising development, the He group’s latest work demonstrates the effectiveness of a novel technology that is able to stimulate and modulate specific brain circuits with submillimeter spatial precision and successfully suppress pain hypersensitivity.

Medication is the go-to treatment for pain, while severe chronic pain conditions are often treated with opioids, which bear many side effects and also raise concerns of addiction, misuse and overdose. In juxtaposition, the technology He’s group is developing and evaluating, transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) modulation, is safe, reversible and noninvasive. Among the canon of noninvasive neuromodulation approaches, tFUS also demonstrates exceptional advantages in modulating brain activities with high spatial specificity and deep brain penetration.

“We demonstrate, for the first time, in a series of rigorous preclinical studies, that precise focused ultrasound neuromodulation at multiple brain targets can significantly change pain-associated behaviors,” articulated He, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “There is an urgent clinical need to develop non-pharmacologic and noninvasive neuromodulation strategies to treat pain, and Carnegie Mellon University is at the forefront of this emerging field.”

The study, published in Blood(opens in new window), involved more than five years of meticulous research. As a next step, the group plans to conduct clinical testing in humans with their novel technology in the near future.

“The impact of this work extends across health care and also the medical device industry,” He expressed. “With 1.5 billion people suffering from chronic pain, this technology has meaningful societal impact. It can be generalized to treat various pain types and is equitable in terms of cost and portability.” 

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health HEAL Initiative; National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative; National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and National Cancer Institute. 

The work is a result of multidisciplinary collaboration, especially with Professor Kalpna Gupta’s group at the University of California, Irvine. CMU collaborators include the first authors Min Gon Kim, BME postdoc and Kai Yu, BME research scientist; Chih-Yu Yeh, BME Ph.D. student; Yunruo Ni and Xiaodan Niu, former BME graduate students. Co-authors at the University of California, Irvine include professor Kalpna Gupta, Raghda Fouda, Donovan Argueta, and Stacy Kiven. Co-authors at the University of Pittsburgh include professor Kang Kim, and Qiyang Chen.