Episode description

Damiano Giuseppe Barone is a neurosurgery clinical lecturer at the University of Cambridge and fellow at The Walton Centre in Liverpool, UK. He is interested in tackling basic and translational challenges for the development of the next generation of neural bioelectronics.

***This podcast is sponsored by Ripple Neuro, check out their Neuroscience Research Tools here***

Top 3 Takeaways:

• "My favorite procedure is the procedure that works and you see the patient after that is is a changed patient."

•  "You come out from medical school like age 23 or 24. Then you get to a general medical program which in the United Kingdom lasts 2 years in and then you get to the residency, which is 8 years. And then 10 years after you are age 34 practicing the neurosurgeon. I personally took what is called an 'out of programme for research/. So basically I halted my neurosurgery residency. I stepped out and I stepped in a PhD program while still covering what is called the on-call rota, which is basically doing emergency work in neurosurgery just to keep my clinical skills going." This added a few more years of training to the list.

• "Quality of life procedures, to be offered to the patients, will have to have a 70 to 80% improvement to justify the risks the patient will have to go through."

0:45 Do you want to introduce yourself better than I just did?

2:45 You spent 20 years in training for this, did you know this at the outset?

4:00  "What's it like to get only a few hours of sleep for years?"

5:00 Why did you choose to go the PhD route as well?

7:45 What's it like to be digging around in the body?

9:45 Sponsorship by Ripple Neuro

10:00 "What's your favorite procedures and what's your least favorite procedures?"

12:15 "What percentage of patients see improvements?"

14:30 "What are some, risks other than it not working, what are maybe some damage or maybe even death is that a possibility?"

16:45 "It's much more dangerous to have, a large device versus a small device. Is that kinda what you've seen?"

18:45 "Have you been involved in electrode design or device design?"

19:45 "What are you working on now?"

25:00 "What are the next steps?"

28:00 "What would you recommend or what kind of advice do you have for people considering this?"