Nano-view of the brain with syringe injectable electronics

Harvard has an electronic device that can be injected directly into the brain, or other body parts, and treat everything from neurodegenerative disorders to paralysis.

Led by Charles Lieber, the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry, an international team of researchers has developed a method of fabricating nanoscale electronic scaffolds that can be injected via syringe. The scaffolds can then be connected to devices and used to monitor neural activity, stimulate tissues, or even promote regeneration of neurons. The research is described in a June 8 paper in Nature Nanotechnology.

“I do feel that this has the potential to be revolutionary,” said Lieber, who holds a joint appointment in the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “This opens up a completely new frontier where we can explore the interface between electronic structures and biology. For the past 30 years, people have made incremental improvements in micro-fabrication techniques that have allowed us to make rigid probes smaller and smaller, but no one has addressed this issue — the electronics/cellular interface — at the level at which biology works.”

In an earlier study, scientists in Lieber’s lab demonstrated that cardiac or nerve cells grown with embedded scaffolds could be used to create “cyborg” tissue. Researchers were then able to record electrical signals generated by the tissue, and to measure changes in those signals as they administered cardio- or neuro-stimulating drugs.