The year 2006 saw the meeting of two great minds, Jean Therme, an esteemed engineer, and Professor Alim-Louis Benabid, a world-famous neurosurgeon who, in conjunction with Professor Pierre Pollack, invented deep brain stimulation, a revolutionary treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The second is at the head of technological research at CEA. He encouraged relationships between the world of industry and that of research, thus bringing the Grenoble site to expert level in electronics, micro- and nanotechnology. Both eminent specialists were fully convinced that, by bringing these two fields together, millions of lives could be transformed, namely, the lives of those patients who are deprived from adequate care because medicine is unable to break the therapeutic deadlock they find themselves in.

The first beneficiaries of the Clinatec set-up will be the patients presenting with quadriplegia, neurodegenerative diseases and poor-prognosis cancer.