DOI: 10.1097/01.NT.0000456277.54696.82
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Issn Print: 1533-7006
Publication Date: 2014/10/16
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Excerpt
In 1989, Alim-Louis Benabid, MD, PhD, a French neurosurgeon, was invited to Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes to meet with colleagues who were laying down the function of precise circuits of the brain. There he would meet Mahlon DeLong, MD, and others who were using the toxin MPTP (1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine) to destroy discrete areas of the brains in monkeys that triggered some of the vexing symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD).
Dr. Benabid, who had spent more than a decade making thalamic lesions in patients with movement disorders, primarily tremor, was given the floor to talk about his new work. Everyone in his research world was searching for more effective ways of treating tremor and PD.
During Dr. Benabid's visit to Hopkins, Dr. DeLong shared findings from his work on a new target — the subthalamic nucleus (STN). He and his colleagues felt that focusing on that target was key to alleviating many of the symptoms of movement disorders, at least in their monkey model. STN lesions proved too damaging for patients, but Dr. Benabid knew that the Hopkins team “had a wonderful target,” and a few years later Dr. Benabid was willing to test the area with his stimulating electrodes. Dr. DeLong was right, according to Dr. Benabid. “When we saw the results we thought it was a miracle,” he added.
In September, Dr. DeLong and Dr. Benabid were jointly awarded the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for their independent work in developing deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus.
“The work that Mahlon did with circuits was instrumental in developing targets for deep brain stimulation,” said Jerrold Vitek, MD, PhD, professor and chair of neurology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. These circuits are crucial to Dr. Benabid's development of DBS and subsequent research, Dr. Vitek said. Dr. Vitek worked in the DeLong laboratory at Hopkins and later ran his own lab at Emory University, but the two continued their collaboration.
In an interview with Neurology Today, Dr. Benabid, chairman of the board at Clinatec Institute in Grenoble, France, and Dr. DeLong, a professor of neurology at Emory University, discussed the research trajectory that led them to develop DBS as a tool for a myriad of neurological disorders.
