Photo: Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group
After he was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s disease, Keith Krehbiel, then 42, stopped at a bookstore to learn more about the progressive neurological disorder. Twenty-eight years later, as a political science professor emeritus at Stanford, he became the first person in the US to receive adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation (aDBS) therapy as a part of regular care. Like a pacemaker for the brain, the device responds in real-time to feedback from the brain while documenting these interactions. In 2011, Medtronic, a medical device company headquartered in Ireland, sought programming for their new sensing neurostimulator. They had the platform, Stanford had the technology and neurologist Dr. Helen Bronte-Stewart had the science. By 2018, projects across the US, Canada and Europe catalyzed an international multi-center pivotal trial for market approval of aDBS.
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