There’s a common malapropism: “It’s not rocket surgery” — an often unintentional mashing of the idioms “It’s not rocket science” and “It’s not brain surgery.”
What Dr. Ali Rezai and his team at WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute are doing looks a lot like rocket surgery: It combines cutting-edge technology with medical practices to treat brain disorders in ways that seemed only possible in science fiction.
We’ve had stories about Rezai’s accomplishments previously, and you may have even seen WVU Medicine commercials touting his success. But Rezai and his team’s work was catapulted into the national spotlight when their research on using ultrasound to treat Alzheimer’s and addiction was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine. Which was followed by write-ups in the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as a 60 Minutes feature on Rezai’s and RNI’s work.
We’d like to take you back to the beginning — more than 20 years ago in Cleveland. Rezai was part of a team that pioneered a new Parkinson’s treatment: An electrical implant in the brain that gave patients back their freedom of movement.
Rezai eventually moved to Morgantown and RNI, where he took to ultrasound. Around 2018-19, he and his team began to use it to treat ailments in the brain. His first major success used ultrasound to treat tremors without invasive surgery.
Around this same time, Rezai and his team began experimenting with adding ultrasound to Alzheimer’s treatments — the groundbreaking work that earned recent acclaim.
Alzheimer’s, a disease in which plaques build up in the brain until they impair cognitive ability, has been traditionally treated with medications. But they work too slowly and have too much difficulty crossing the blood-brain barrier to be effective. Rezai and his team found that using targeted ultrasound allowed medications to cross the barrier and reach the plaque-ridden areas of the brain. This combination treatment shows great promise for slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s, if not necessarily reversing it.
While their Alzheimer’s work was ongoing, Rezai also began looking at treating addiction, using a similar implant to the one he’d used for Parkinson’s patients, but this time targeting the electrical impulses at the behavioral regulation part of the brain rather than the motor-control part.
More recently, Rezai has taken what he’s learned about the power of ultrasound and turned it on treating addiction. Rezai adapted his ultrasound remedy for tremors into one for substance abuse disorder. Rezai focused on the reward center, but instead of sending electrical impulses through it, this time he used ultrasound waves to, essentially, reset it.
And so far, the treatment has shown great promise. Of the 15 patients on which Rezai and his team have used ultrasound, 10 have remained completely drug free.
With all the stigma around substance abuse disorders, we forget that addiction isn’t strictly a matter of choice: Addiction changes the brain’s chemistry and the way our brains and bodies function. Chemical imbalances cannot always be overcome by sheer force of will, which is why traditional rehab may not always work.
That’s what makes this work so amazing: It goes to the heart of the problem — the altered area of the brain — and resets it back to normal function. That neurological reset could be the key to helping people break free from addiction.
HB 5014 would give $2 million to the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute to continue this research. The House of Delegates has passed it, and it’s now up for consideration in the Senate. Funding Rezai’s non-invasive addiction treatment should be a no-brainer for legislators.
