Biocompatible sensor implant conforms to organ growth

The advance by researchers at the University of California, Irvine and Columbia University, New York is detailed in Nature Communications.

In their paper, the UC Irvine scientists describe their construction of complementary, internal, ion-gated, organic electrochemical transistors that are more suited chemically, biologically and electronically to living tissues than rigid, silicon-based technologies. Furthermore, the medical device based on these transistors can function in sensitive parts of the body and conform to organ structures, even as they grow.

“Advanced electronics have been in development for several decades now, so there is a large repository of available circuit designs. The problem is that most of these transistor and amplifier technologies are not compatible with our physiology,” said co-author Dion Khodagholy, Henry Samueli Faculty Excellence Professor in UC Irvine’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “For our innovation, we used organic polymer materials that are inherently closer to us biologically, and we designed it to interact with ions, because the language of the brain and body is ionic, not electronic.”