Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Blockage of an artery in the brain results in stroke and often leads to motor functioning impairments, or even death. The sole therapy approved for stroke is only an option for less than 10% of patients. Drug development failure is thought to be due to poor choice of pre-human research models (e.g., rodent research). Thus, the Stroke Therapy Academic Industry Roundtable committee suggested that non-human primate (NHP) stroke models, with accurate motor functioning assessments, be used. Unfortunately, the current assessments used are subjective, being founded on observations of NHP behaviours post-stroke, and scores often vary between researchers on the same NHP. With advancements in robotics and virtual reality there is now the possibility to measure motor functioning of patients performing virtual tasks, accurately and objectively (same results even across different researchers). The Kinarm (Kingston, ON) is one such robot, and this study aims to validate the Visually Guided Reaching (VGR) task as a tool to measure motor function in NHPs who have undergone stroke. We hypothesize that motor impairments identified using the VGR task will follow similar trends and will be more specific between individual NHPs when compared to using the validated, subjective assessments. Twenty adult cynomolgus macaques will be trained for 3 months to complete the VGR task, then they will undergo a surgically induced stroke for 2 hours. Following 3-weeks of recovery, NHPs will be assessed using the mentioned subjective assessments in addition to the VGR task, approximately 30 days post-stroke. This work is valuable for improving the accuracy of measuring motor functioning impairments in NHP stroke studies, which can improve the model’s capability to predict successful results in humans.