Oxana Semyachkina-Glushkovskaya

Abstract: The 21st century has been heralded as a golden age in neuroscience. High-tech equipment has emerged for intravital imaging of brain structures and control of brain function using chips, light, and viruses. However, advances in pharmacological treatment of brain diseases are very limited due to difficulties in crossing the blood-brain barrier. Consequently, brain diseases still account for 30% of all known pathologies.
Photobiomodulation (PBM), which relies on non-invasive application of infrared light to targets such as the meningeal lymphatic vessels, offers promising new approaches to brain disease therapy. PBM technologies are safe, commercially viable, and portable.
Within Russian Science Foundation mega-grant 23-75-30001, the world's first medical light device (the AS-SGMO) was developed for stimulation of the brain and its meninges to lymphatic removal of toxins, such as beta-amyloid, from brain tissue and treat Alzheimer's disease. This technology was developed in accordance with modern medical requirements. Specifically, it is wearable and can be used both in the clinic for patient treatment and also at home, on airplanes, in the car, and in other comfortable settings to maintain brain function under conditions of intense work, emotional strain, stress, sleep deprivation, and age-related changes in the brain—i.e., in those at risk for dementia and other brain diseases.
This new field, called neurolymphotonics (doi:10.7150/thno.120374), reflects global changes in preventive medicine. Safe and wearable technologies are emerging that can be effectively used to maintain active brain function under conditions of chronic or excessive exposure to risk factors for neurodegenerative, metabolic, and age-related changes in the brain, with the goal of supporting active longevity.
An important continuation of mega-grant 23-75-3001 will be the development of a safe technology for the treatment of postnatal brain injury in newborns and infants, for whom pharmacological therapy is limited not only by the presence of the blood-brain barrier but also by age.

Speaker: Oxana Semyachkina-Glushkovskaya is the head of Chair of Physiology of Human and Animals at the Department of Biology in the Saratov State University (Russia) and she is Deputy Director for the Commercialization of Scientific Research at the Scientific Medical Center in the Saratov State University. Her research interests are focused in neuroscience and in the development of breakthrough technologies for non-invasive therapy of brain diseases, brain drug delivery and monitoring of the immune system of the brain. She published several pioneering works discovering the promising strategies in rehabilitation medicine based on the application of the new generation lasers for stimulation of lymphatic clearance of toxins and wastes from the sleeping brain: lymphasleep.com/publications2

Keywords: medical equipment, commercialization, applied and fundamental grants.

Acknowledgments: The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 23-75-30001.