Professor Alim Louis Benabid

Professor Alim Louis Benabid studied at Grenoble Joseph Fourier University while simultaneously working at the Medical School, where he earned his MD in Neurosciences in 1962 with a focus on movement disorders. He later completed a PhD in physics at the Faculty of Basic Sciences in 1970, after which he was appointed Full Professor of Biophysics. He spent a sabbatical year at the Salk Institute in San Diego with Floyd Bloom and Roger Guillemin.

Back in France, Alim created and activated an INSERM Research Unit, where he discovered and developed as a surgical therapy the inhibitory properties of High Frequency Deep Brain Stimulation (HF DBS) in the basal ganglia (Thalamus, VIM, Pallidum and Subthalamic Nucleus STN) and other cortical structures. This led to the development of this method, applied first to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease related symptoms (tremor and akinesia), but soon to the movement disorders at large, including the dystonia and essential tremor, and then to psychiatric related diseases such as depression and obsessive compulsive disorders. Extension to various nuclear targets, allowed to control and treat other diseases such as epilepsy, and some forms of depression. For these achievements, he was awarded several Prizes such as the Lasker Prize and soon after the Breakthrough Prize. During the same period of time he created avec developed the Clinatec Research Institute within the Grenoble Research Institute of the Atomic Energy Center (CEA).