Depression remains the most common cause of ill health and disability worldwide, per the World Health Organization, and while doctors are getting better at treating its acute symptoms, there is still a group of people who have what Patricio Riva Posse, a neurologist and associate professor of psychiatry at Emory University, calls “treatment-resistant depression.”
Providing those people long-term relief has proven difficult. Over the last two decades, however, researchers have been working to develop a targeted surgical treatment that can stimulate the brain – adapting the deep-brain stimulation technology that was initially developed to treat movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease.
“An analogy to it is like a pacemaker that you have for your heart,” Riva Posse said. “This is a pacemaker [for] the brain. The pacemaker, what it does is maintain a constant stimulation in the brain that allows patients to have minimal symptoms of depression and to carry on with their lives.”
Riva Posse and a number of his colleagues will present at South by Southwest on the state of their research, which will be moving to a national clinical trial in the next two years. The panel is one of a trio at this year’s event that will address topics related to brain health and perceptions of modern science.
Another of the panels, titled Reconstructing the Human Brain in the Lab, will address research being conducted at the International Space Station and a select number of other labs to generate three-dimensional models of the brain from stem cells – which can then be used to advance research into neurological conditions.
“We have many defenses in medicine for different parts of the body: People are not dying [as much] anymore from heart attacks,” Alysson Muotri, a neurologist at University of California San Diego said. “We know how to fix [them]. We are curing cancer. But the brain remains a mystery. The latest drug developed for a neurological condition was in the Seventies.”
The relatively slow rate of progress in the treatment of neurological conditions means that diseases like Alzheimer’s remain nearly impossible to control. The main reason for the limited progress, Muotri said, is the limited accessibility of brain tissue to scientists.
“The reason why we make progress on the heart, blood disease, and cancer is that we can take a biopsy and study [it] in the lab,” Muotri said. “We cannot do that with the brain.”
Now, however, stem cells are changing the equation – allowing scientists to effectively re-create the human brain inside a lab and study how those cells might be used to heal damaged areas of the brain. A 2020 study found that mice treated with a partially stem-cell-based therapy had a slower onset of disease and lived longer.
The third panel, called Crisis to Credibility, will cover one of the issues looming over numerous areas of research in the current political climate: a newfound lack of trust in modern science, exacerbated by the fractured media landscape and the very public stances of leading figures in the federal government.
Science and the Human Brain Panels at SXSW
Reconstructing the Human Brain in the Lab
Friday 7, 4pm, JW Marriott, Salon D
Crisis to Credibility: Restoring Trust in Modern Science
Friday 7, 2:30pm, JW Marriott, Salon BC
Revolutionizing Mental Healthcare with Implantable Devices
Saturday 8, 10am, JW Marriott, Salon BC
This article appears in March 7 • 2025.