  | | Jospeh Pancrazio, NIH/NINDS |
According to NAKFI Smart Prosthetics Conference attendee Joseph Pancrazio, the most promising action initiated three months after the conference was the development of a funding program announcement to support feasibility or pilot studies for implanted devices. In December 2008 – two years following the conference, this funding program was announced. According to the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the purpose “is to encourage applications to pursue translational and pilot clinical studies for neural prosthetics. The program will utilize the cooperative agreement mechanism to enable support for milestone-driven projects for the design, development, and demonstration of clinically-useful neural prosthetic devices. Activities supported in this program include implementation of clinical prototype devices, preclinical safety and efficacy testing, design verification and validation activities, pursuit of regulatory approval for clinical study, and proof-of-concept or pilot clinical studies.”
Joseph J. Pancrazio earned a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1984, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia (UVa), Charlottesville, in 1988 and 1990, respectively. His Ph.D. training focused on the ion channel electrophysiology using the patch clamp technique. After postdoctoral training in pharmacology in the Department of Anesthesiology at UVa as a recipient of a National Research Service Award, he received a joint appointment in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor of research at the University of Virginia in 1991, where he taught graduate level courses in Neuropharmacology and Bioelectronic Systems. In 1997, he joined Georgetown University Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as an Assistant Professor working at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. In 1998, he joined the NRL as a Principal Investigator at the Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering, becoming the Head of Code 6920, the Laboratory of Biomolecular Dynamics, in 2002. At the NRL, Dr. Pancrazio led an extramurally supported project including biologists and engineers for the development and demonstration of a biosensor system based cultured neuronal networks for environmental threat detection. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications, several book chapters and review papers, and has two patents. Dr. Pancrazio joined the Repair and Plasticity Cluster of NINDS in January of 2004, where his primary research interests include: 1) neural engineering and neuroprosthesis; 2) novel neural repair technologies and biomaterials, and 3) neural information processing and control.
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