McGovern Institute Special Seminar with Alan Mardinly & Murat Günel
Building 46, Room 46-3189, 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA
Seminar with Alan Mardinly & Murat Günel Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2026Time: 3:00pmLocation: Seminar Room 3189, Building 46This is an in-person event Talk Title: Towards dopaminergic biohybrid implants for Parkinson's disease Abstract: Neural interfaces traditionally stimulate the brain with electric fields, but the brain mostly talks to itself using chemical neurotransmitters. Optogenetics approaches to brain modulations are widespread in research, but have not translated to the clinic because of challenges in opsin sensitivity, gene delivery, and immunogenicity. However, allogeneic cell therapies have recently made the jump to the clinic. Here, we describe an approach to neural interfacing leveraging these advances to combine optogenetics with immune-evasive cell therapy. First we developed an ultrasensitve microbial opsin using modern protein language models and high throughput patch clamp screening. Then we engineered the genome of iPSCs to express the opsin and evade the immune system, and show that they fail to elicit an immune response in humanized mice. We differentiated these iPSC into midbrain dopamine neuron progenitors and engraft the cells in a thin-film micro-LED…