Design of a high voltage stimulator chip for a stroke rehabilitation system.

This paper describes the design of an 8-channel high voltage stimulator chip for rehabilitation of stroke patients through surface stimulation, which requires high stimulation currents and high compliance voltage. The chip gets stimulation control data through its Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), and can accordingly generate biphasic stimulation currents with different amplitudes, duration, frequencies and polarities independently for each channel. The current driver is implemented with thick oxide devices with a supply voltage up to 90V. The chip is designed in a 0.35εm X-FAB high voltage process.

Synthetic protection short interfering RNA screen reveals glyburide as a novel radioprotector.

To assist in screening existing drugs for use as potential radioprotectors, we used a human unbiased 16,560 short interfering RNA (siRNA) library targeting the druggable genome. We performed a synthetic protection screen that was designed to identify genes that, when silenced, protected human glioblastoma T98G cells from gamma-radiation-induced cell death. We identified 116 candidate protective genes, then identified 10 small molecule inhibitors of 13 of these candidate gene products and tested their radioprotective effects. Glyburide, a clinically used second-generation hypoglycemic drug, effectively decreased radiation-induced cell death in several cell lines including T98G, glioblastoma U-87 MG, and normal lung epithelial BEAS-2B and in primary cultures of astrocytes. Glyburide significantly increased the survival of 32D cl3 murine hematopoietic progenitor cells when administrated before irradiation. Glyburide was radioprotective in vivo (90% of C57BL/6NHsd female mice pretreated with 10 mg/kg glyburide survived 9.5 Gy total-body irradiation compared to 42% of irradiated controls, P = 0.0249). These results demonstrate the power of unbiased siRNA synthetic protection screening with a druggable genome library to identify new radioprotectors.