Worldwide, over 2.5 million people live with spinal cord injury, with over 100,000 new cases occurring annually. Spinal cord injury often causes motor dysfunction below the level of the injury. For example, thoracic and lumbar spinal cord injury can cause paraplegia and cervical spinal cord injury can cause quadriplegia. Such injury is permanent and often severe and there is no effective treatment. Various neurologic diseases also involve damaged or dysfunctional spinal cord neurons. Neural stem cell grafts have potential for treating such conditions. However, it has not been possible to obtain sufficient numbers of appropriately patterned neural stem cells, having a spinal cord positional identity, for implanted cells to survive and functionally engraft.

Brain machine interfaces (BMIs) have the potential to help individuals with functional impairments, such as loss of motor control, due to neurological disease or spinal cord injury. BMIs map brain signals acquired in relevant brain regions to patient intent to enable functional restoration. In previous studies, BMIs have enabled patients to control robotic arm movements, and type by translating brain signals directly into text.  Intracortical BMIs record and sample brain signals from relevant regions of the brain at rates high enough to process both local field potentials (LFP) and action potentials (spikes).The development of high performance brain machine interfaces (BMIs) requires scaling recording channel count to enable simultaneous recording from large populations of neurons. Unfortunately, proposed implantable neural interfaces have power requirements that scale linearly with channel count. 

Current research and practice in the field of therapeutic rTMS is not taking into account 1) inter-individual variability 2) variability between brain areas 3) variability or differences between oscillations in distinct and overlapping frequency bands, 4) existence of high- and low-excitability phase periods in each oscillatory cycle. Clinical treatments with rTMS and experimental research findings show mixed effects, with rTMS protocols inducing variable degrees of brain plasticity over subjects and sessions.

Red light exposure can have phototherapeutic effects on skin cells and other biological cells and tissues affected by UV damage. However, existing methods and devices using red light in DNA phototherapy have not identified the proper duration, intensity, or delivery mechanisms for optimal DNA repair. If the radiant intensity of the red light is too low, then exposure is inadequate and the repair biomarkers are not activated. Conversely, prolonged exposure to excessive electromagnetic radiation only furthers DNA damage. Moreover, in the context of skin treatment, excessive radiant intensity can burn tissue or have carcinogenic side effects. Thus, there is a need for a device and methods of use that provide safe, effective, and targeted red light DNA phototherapy.

The heart consists of a multitude of diverse cardiomyocyte cell types, including atrial, ventricular and pacemaker cells, which cooperate to ensure proper cardiac function and circulation throughout the body. The rhythm of the heart beat is regulated by the sinoatrial node (SAN), functionally known as the cardiac pacemaker. Loss or dysfunction of these pacemaker cardiomyocytes leads to severe cardiac arrhythmias, syncope and/or even death. Although artificial pacemakers exist to help overcome these issues, several serious limitations and problems have emerged with this approach over the past several decades including electrode fracture or damage to insulation, infection, re-operations for battery exchange, and venous thrombosis. Moreover, size mismatch and the fact that pacemaker leads do not grow with children are a concerning problem. Thus, replacing artificial pacemakers with biological pacemakers potentially overcomes these artificial pacemaker issues including the expense and complications associated with device replacement, device or lead failure, and infection. To achieve these goals, understanding how pacemaker cardiomyocytes are generated is necessary to develop a human biological pacemaker for cardiac cellular therapies.

Ileus is the hypomotility of the gastrointestinal tract in the absence of mechanical bowel obstruction. Postoperative ileus occurs in approximately 50 percent of patients who undergo major abdominal surgery. The clinical consequences of postoperative ileus may be profound and increases medical costs due to prolonged hospital stays.