Assistant Professor Jennifer Collinger is part of a Pitt team whose research led to the creation of a brain-controlled robotic arm, one that enabled a quadriplegic man to “feel” and remotely move his own hand — even individual fingers — for the first time since he was paralyzed more than a decade ago.

Q: How has your work benefited from animal research?

Colinger: Without it, I don’t think this kind of research would be happening now. There’s no other way to know this much about how the brain controls movement using non-invasive methods in humans, so it’s been using this implant technologies in monkeys that’s really told us how the brain works.

We might not even had been to the point of testing prosthetic control in people now had we not done this in monkeys.

There were observations not only when a monkey moved did you see activity in motor cortex, but when they watched somebody else moving, the cortex was also active. So that got people thinking, "Oh, so somebody with paralysis may be able to activate their motor cortex even though it’s disconnected because of a spinal cord injury." There’s been decades of research that got us to the point where we can even think about doing this. Had that not existed, I think we’d be starting from 30 years ago. I think we would be behind.

What would you say to somebody who opposes animal research?

It’s important to know that people who are doing that kind of research are really motivated to understand some basic principles of how the body works, and often times that’s guided by a motivation to improve medical therapies, treatments or technologies.

A lot of what we know would not be possible without animal research.