Tag Archives: H2020

Predicting how a memristor functions

An April 3, 2017 news item on Nanowerk announces a new memristor development (Note: A link has been removed),

Researchers from the CNRS [Centre national de la recherche scientifique; France] , Thales, and the Universities of Bordeaux, Paris-Sud, and Evry have created an artificial synapse capable of learning autonomously. They were also able to model the device, which is essential for developing more complex circuits. The research was published in Nature Communications (“Learning through ferroelectric domain dynamics in solid-state synapses”)

An April 3, 2017 CNRS press release, which originated the news item, provides a nice introduction to the memristor concept before providing a few more details about this latest work (Note: A link has been removed),

One of the goals of biomimetics is to take inspiration from the functioning of the brain [also known as neuromorphic engineering or neuromorphic computing] in order to design increasingly intelligent machines. This principle is already at work in information technology, in the form of the algorithms used for completing certain tasks, such as image recognition; this, for instance, is what Facebook uses to identify photos. However, the procedure consumes a lot of energy. Vincent Garcia (Unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales) and his colleagues have just taken a step forward in this area by creating directly on a chip an artificial synapse that is capable of learning. They have also developed a physical model that explains this learning capacity. This discovery opens the way to creating a network of synapses and hence intelligent systems requiring less time and energy.

Our brain’s learning process is linked to our synapses, which serve as connections between our neurons. The more the synapse is stimulated, the more the connection is reinforced and learning improved. Researchers took inspiration from this mechanism to design an artificial synapse, called a memristor. This electronic nanocomponent consists of a thin ferroelectric layer sandwiched between two electrodes, and whose resistance can be tuned using voltage pulses similar to those in neurons. If the resistance is low the synaptic connection will be strong, and if the resistance is high the connection will be weak. This capacity to adapt its resistance enables the synapse to learn.

Although research focusing on these artificial synapses is central to the concerns of many laboratories, the functioning of these devices remained largely unknown. The researchers have succeeded, for the first time, in developing a physical model able to predict how they function. This understanding of the process will make it possible to create more complex systems, such as a series of artificial neurons interconnected by these memristors.

As part of the ULPEC H2020 European project, this discovery will be used for real-time shape recognition using an innovative camera1 : the pixels remain inactive, except when they see a change in the angle of vision. The data processing procedure will require less energy, and will take less time to detect the selected objects. The research involved teams from the CNRS/Thales physics joint research unit, the Laboratoire de l’intégration du matériau au système (CNRS/Université de Bordeaux/Bordeaux INP), the University of Arkansas (US), the Centre de nanosciences et nanotechnologies (CNRS/Université Paris-Sud), the Université d’Evry, and Thales.

© Sören Boyn / CNRS/Thales physics joint research unit.

Artist’s impression of the electronic synapse: the particles represent electrons circulating through oxide, by analogy with neurotransmitters in biological synapses. The flow of electrons depends on the oxide’s ferroelectric domain structure, which is controlled by electric voltage pulses.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Learning through ferroelectric domain dynamics in solid-state synapses by Sören Boyn, Julie Grollier, Gwendal Lecerf, Bin Xu, Nicolas Locatelli, Stéphane Fusil, Stéphanie Girod, Cécile Carrétéro, Karin Garcia, Stéphane Xavier, Jean Tomas, Laurent Bellaiche, Manuel Bibes, Agnès Barthélémy, Sylvain Saïghi, & Vincent Garcia. Nature Communications 8, Article number: 14736 (2017) doi:10.1038/ncomms14736 Published online: 03 April 2017

This paper is open access.

Thales or Thales Group is a French company, from its Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Thales Group (French: [talɛs]) is a French multinational company that designs and builds electrical systems and provides services for the aerospace, defence, transportation and security markets. Its headquarters are in La Défense[2] (the business district of Paris), and its stock is listed on the Euronext Paris.

The company changed its name to Thales (from the Greek philosopher Thales,[3] pronounced [talɛs] reflecting its pronunciation in French) from Thomson-CSF in December 2000 shortly after the £1.3 billion acquisition of Racal Electronics plc, a UK defence electronics group. It is partially state-owned by the French government,[4] and has operations in more than 56 countries. It has 64,000 employees and generated €14.9 billion in revenues in 2016. The Group is ranked as the 475th largest company in the world by Fortune 500 Global.[5] It is also the 10th largest defence contractor in the world[6] and 55% of its total sales are military sales.[4]

The ULPEC (Ultra-Low Power Event-Based Camera) H2020 [Horizon 2020 funded) European project can be found here,

The long term goal of ULPEC is to develop advanced vision applications with ultra-low power requirements and ultra-low latency. The output of the ULPEC project is a demonstrator connecting a neuromorphic event-based camera to a high speed ultra-low power consumption asynchronous visual data processing system (Spiking Neural Network with memristive synapses). Although ULPEC device aims to reach TRL 4, it is a highly application-oriented project: prospective use cases will b…

Finally, for anyone curious about Thales, the philosopher (from his Wikipedia entry), Note: Links have been removed,

Thales of Miletus (/ˈθeɪliːz/; Greek: Θαλῆς (ὁ Μῑλήσιος), Thalēs; c. 624 – c. 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek/Phoenician philosopher, mathematician and astronomer from Miletus in Asia Minor (present-day Milet in Turkey). He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition,[1][2] and he is otherwise historically recognized as the first individual in Western civilization known to have entertained and engaged in scientific philosophy.[3][4]

A pragmatic approach to alternatives to animal testing

Maryse de la Giroday explains how emerging innovations can provide much-needed alternatives to animal testing. She also shares highlights of the 9^th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing.

‘Guinea pigging’ is the practice of testing drugs that have passed in vitro and in vivo tests on healthy humans in a Phase I clinical trial. In fact, healthy humans can make quite a bit of money as guinea pigs. The practice is sufficiently well-entrenched that there is a magazine, Guinea Pig Zero, devoted to professionals. While most participants anticipate some unpleasant side effects, guinea pigging can sometimes be a dangerous ‘profession’.

HARMFUL TO HEALTH

One infamous incident highlighting the dangers of guinea pigging occurred in 2006 at Northwick Park Hospital outside London. Volunteers were offered £2,000 to participate in a Phase I clinical trial to test a prospective treatment – a monoclonal antibody designed for rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. The drug, called TGN1412, caused catastrophic systemic organ failure in participants. All six individuals receiving the drug required hospital treatment. One participant reportedly underwent amputation of fingers and toes. Another reacted with symptoms comparable to John Merrick, the Elephant Man.

The root of the disaster lay in subtle immune system differences between humans and cynomolgus monkeys – the model animal tested prior to the clinical trial. The drug was designed for the CD28 receptor on T cells. The monkeys’ receptors closely resemble those found in humans. However, unlike these monkeys, humans have other immune cells that carry CD28. The trial participants received a starting dosage that was 0.2 per cent of what the monkeys received in their final tests, but failure to take these additional receptors into account meant a dosage that was supposed to occupy 10 per cent of the available CD28 receptors instead occupied 90 per cent. After the event, a Russian inventor purchased the commercial rights to the drug and renamed it TAB08. It has been further developed by Russian company, TheraMAB, and TAB08 is reportedly in Phase II clinical trials.

HUMAN-ON-A-CHIP AND ORGANOID PROJECTS

While animal testing has been a powerful and useful tool for determining safe usage for pharmaceuticals and other types of chemicals, it is also a cruel and imperfect practice. Moreover, it typically only predicts 30-60 per cent of human responses to new drugs. Nanotechnology and other emerging innovations present possibilities for reducing, and in some cases eliminating, the use of animal models.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), still better known for its publicity stunts, maintains a webpage outlining a number of alternatives including in silico testing (computer modelling), and, perhaps most interestingly, human-on-a-chip and organoid (tissue engineering) projects.

Organ-on-a-chip projects use stem cells to create human tissues that replicate the functions of human organs. Discussions about human-on-a-chip activities – a phrase used to describe 10 interlinked organ chips – were a highlight of the 9^th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing held in Prague, Czech Republic, last year. One project highlighted at the event was a joint US National Institutes of Health (NIH), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project led by Dan Tagle that claimed it would develop functioning human-on-a-chip by 2017. However, he and his team were surprisingly close-mouthed and provided few details making it difficult to assess how close they are to achieving their goal.

By contrast, Uwe Marx – Leader of the ‘Multi-Organ-Chip’ programme in the Institute of Biotechnology at the Technical University of Berlin and Scientific Founder of TissUse, a human-on-a-chip start-up company – claims to have sold two-organ chips. He also claims to have successfully developed a four-organ chip and that he is on his way to building a human-on-a-chip. Though these chips remain to be seen, if they are, they will integrate microfluidics, cultured cells and materials patterned at the nanoscale to mimic various organs, and will allow chemical testing in an environment that somewhat mirrors a human.

Another interesting alternative for animal testing is organoids – a feature in regenerative medicine that can function as test sites. Engineers based at Cornell University recently published a paper on their functional, synthetic immune organ. Inspired by the lymph node, the organoid is comprised of gelatin-based biomaterials, which are reinforced with silicate nanoparticles (to keep the tissue from melting when reaching body temperature) and seeded with cells allowing it to mimic the anatomical microenvironment of a lymphatic node. It behaves like its inspiration converting B cells to germinal centres which activate, mature and mutate antibody genes when the body is under attack. The engineers claim to be able to control the immune response and to outperform 2D cultures with their 3D organoid. If the results are reproducible, the organoid could be used to develop new therapeutics.

Maryse de la Giroday is a science communications consultant and writer.

Full disclosure: Maryse de la Giroday received transportation and accommodation for the 9^th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing from SEURAT-1, a European Union project, making scientific inquiries to facilitate the transition to animal testing alternatives, where possible.

ETA July 1, 2015: I would like to acknowledge more sources for the information in this article,

Sources:

The guinea pigging term, the ‘professional aspect, the Northwick Park story, and the Guinea Pig Zero magazine can be found in Carl Elliot’s excellent 2006 story titled ‘Guinea-Pigging’ for New Yorker magazine.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/07/guinea-pigging

Information about the drug used in the Northwick Park Hospital disaster, the sale of the rights to a Russian inventor, and the June 2015 date for the current Phase II clinical trials were found in this Wikipedia essay titled, TGN 1412.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412

Additional information about the renamed drug, TAB08 and its Phase II clinical trials was found on (a) a US government website for information on clinical trials, (b) in a Dec. 2014 (?) TheraMAB advertisement in a Nature group magazine and a Jan. 2014 press release,

https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01990157?term=TAB08_RA01&rank=1

http://www.theramab.ru/TheraMAB_NAture.pdf

http://theramab.ru/en/news/phase_II

An April 2015 article (Experimental drug that injured UK volunteers resumes in human trials) by Owen Dyer for the British Medical Journal also mentioned the 2015 TheraMab Phase II clinical trials and provided information about the information about Macaque (cynomolgus) monkey tests.

http://www.bmj.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/content/350/bmj.h1831

BMJ 2015; 350 doi: http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1136/bmj.h1831 (Published 02 April 2015) Cite this as: BMJ 2015;350:h1831

A 2009 study by Christopher Horvath and Mark Milton somewhat contradicts the Dyer article’s contention that a species Macaque monkey was used as an animal model. (As the Dyer article is more recent and the Horvath/Milton analysis is more complex covering TGN 1412 in the context of other MAB drugs and their precursor tests along with specific TGN 1412 tests, I opted for the simple description.)

The TeGenero Incident [another name for the Northwick Park Accident] and the Duff Report Conclusions: A Series of Unfortunate Events or an Avoidable Event? by Christopher J. Horvath and Mark N. Milton. Published online before print February 24, 2009, doi: 10.1177/0192623309332986 Toxicol Pathol April 2009 vol. 37 no. 3 372-383

http://tpx.sagepub.com/content/37/3/372.full

Philippa Roxbuy’s May 24, 2013 BBC news online article provided confirmation and an additional detail or two about the Northwick Park Hospital accident. It notes that other models, in addition to animal models, are being developed.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-22556736

Anne Ju’s excellent June 10,2015 news release about the Cornell University organoid (synthetic immune organ) project was very helpful.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/06/engineers-synthetic-immune-organ-produces-antibodies

There will also be a magazine article in International Innovation, which will differ somewhat from the blog posting, due to editorial style and other requirements.

ETA July 22, 2015: I now have a link to the magazine article.

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Tag Archives: H2020

Predicting how a memristor functions

A pragmatic approach to alternatives to animal testing

Maryse de la Giroday explains how emerging innovations can provide much-needed alternatives to animal testing. She also shares highlights of the 9^th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing.

HARMFUL TO HEALTH

HUMAN-ON-A-CHIP AND ORGANOID PROJECTS

Maryse de la Giroday explains how emerging innovations can provide much-needed alternatives to animal testing. She also shares highlights of the 9th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing.

HARMFUL TO HEALTH

HUMAN-ON-A-CHIP AND ORGANOID PROJECTS

Maryse de la Giroday explains how emerging innovations can provide much-needed alternatives to animal testing. She also shares highlights of the 9^th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing.