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How Medical Pioneers Grégoire Courtine and Jocelyne Bloch, With Support From the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, Are Helping Paralysed Patients to Walk Again

In Partnership with Rolex | The co-founders of Onward Medical have spent a decade working on a groundbreaking idea: using electrodes, controlled by the brain, to help give movement back to tetraplegic patients. Its applications for other serious health conditions could be even greater.

Grégoire Courtine has a vision: to help paralysed patients walk again. “To walk, the brain needs to send a command to the region of the spinal cord that controls leg movement. When there is a spinal cord injury, this communication is interrupted,” explains Courtine. “We aim to restore this communication with what we call a ‘digital bridge.’”

A French neuroscientist, Courtine and his colleague, the Swiss neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch, have spent years working on bioengineering technologies to help restore movement to those who might otherwise never be able to walk again.

As part of a new video series, Planet Pioneers, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, Courtine and Bloch sat down with WIRED’s Greg Williams to discuss their journey so far, and the wider potential applications for their work—from restoring movement to treating patients with dementia.

Michel Roccati, a patient with complete spinal cord lesion, had the Epidural Electrical Stimulation (EES) of the spinal cord implanted in 2021.

Together with colleagues at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Courtine and Bloch are working on what is known as epidural electrical stimulation, or EES. This involves implanting electrodes on the surface of the brain, which communicate wirelessly with an implant in the patients’ spine. In 2021, they successfully implanted the first spine stimulation implant in a patient; in May 2023, they announced that they had successfully trialled the full ‘digital bridge’ system on a paralysed patient, who was then able to walk again.

Since 2019, Courtine and Bloch’s work has been supported by Rolex through its Perpetual Planet Initiative. “Receiving the Rolex Award for Enterprise for me was an incredible opportunity to shed light on the dramatic consequences of spinal cord injury, and also attract other companies, individuals, and philanthropy to help us in developing our therapeutic solutions,” says Courtine.

The pair founded Onward Medical in 2014 to help scale their solution and take it global. And while their solution is at an early stage, both are optimistic that in the future, technology may provide new hope for those suffering from paralysis. As Bloch says, “We’re still at the beginning.”

To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.