Behind the breakthrough
Pitt Med students advance stroke recovery research.
All Erick Carranza can figure is that his interest in disability research stems from a childhood experience.
It wasn’t a traumatic one.
“No one in my family has a disability, but my whole interest in technology is helping people with disabilities,” he says. “I remember seeing a cartoon when I was younger about a kid who had a prosthesis, and I was amazed by it. That was it, probably.”
Growing up in Peru, Carranza said he was mesmerized by the science unfolding in developed countries, like the advancements in prostheses, which he used to consider the stuff of science fiction.
Coming to Pitt Med in 2019 with a background in robotic devices and automation, Carranza is now a PhD student working in the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs (RNEL), where he is advised by Elvira Pirondini, a PhD assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and of bioengineering. He’s played an integral role in a stroke paralysis research study run by a team of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University scientists that restored significant arm function to patients through spinal implants. (See “A moving story,” page 24.)
“It’s the person doing what they want to do as they want to do it, as opposed to something external doing it for them,” says Erynn Sorensen, about her inspiration to be on the team. Sorensen is also a PhD student in the lab where she is advised by Marco Capogrosso, a PhD assistant professor of neurological surgery. She is a co-lead author on a paper published with Carranza and the Pitt/CMU team in Nature Medicine about the study.
No approved treatment exists for regaining hand movement in the chronic stage of stroke. The Pitt/CMU team’s approach was to thread electrodes through the vertebrae of study participants, delivering electric charges to specific locations along the spinal cord and allowing the patients to make desired movements.
Sorensen joined the lab to merge her neuroscience background with a more clinical approach, and she and Carranza are among several graduate students and trainees who’ve taken leading roles on the ongoing study—including Souvik Roy (MD ’23), who was completing a research fellowship, as well as students from the Swanson School of Engineering and CMU. Along with evaluating whether the device helps patients with their movements, Sorensen helps to run experiments and coordinate them. Carranza’s main role has been developing and assessing tasks during which patients use a Kinarm, an exoskeleton that supports the patient’s arm and measures movement (while the nerves are stimulated through the implanted electrodes).
Each patient’s disability is distinct, so developing appropriate tasks for them to attempt can take days of fine-tuning. “We customize the task to each patient’s limitations and try to challenge the patient to do things they can’t normally do,” Carranza says.
The project has reinforced his desire to work at a company that uses technology to help patients affected by stroke or other neurological diseases. “I have never seen a technology before that makes such a big difference in such a short period of time,” he says. “If I can do this for the rest of my life, that would be so cool.”
Patrick Monahan contributed to this story.
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