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Our Cyborg Future Could Be a Needle to the Brain

Bio-nano-engineers have devised tiny electronic devices that can be injected directly into the brain.
Image: Lieber Research Group

It's probably only slightly less uncomfortable than it sounds: flexible, millimeter-scale electronics packed into a needle and injected directly into the brain. This is now a real thing (for a few mice at least), courtesy of researchers at Harvard University and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing, and it offers the possibility of non-surgical implants that can monitor the brain's neurobiology in real time.

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The new technology is described in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

The process, in the words of the nano-engineers behind the devices, reduces to a "seamless and minimally invasive three-dimensional interpenetration of electronics within artificial or natural structures." The electronics themselves are introduced as a fine mesh which, having been successfully implanted, "unrolls" or unfolds itself, resulting in a self-assembling structure that's more or less the same as it was before being packed into a needle, with the same functionality and nearly the same overall size.

Three-dimensional confocal microscopy image of mesh electronics injected into the lateral ventricle. Image: Lieber

In a series of experiments, the research group found that even after five weeks of implantation, mouse test subjects showed no immune response to the new devices. On top of that, the introduced electronics were able to successfully network with healthy neurons in their new mouse-brain homes with a minimum of tissue damage.

"Recent work has shown that flexible electronics can be placed into 3D structures through surgical processes, or by being attached to and subsequently released from a rigid delivery substrates for biological and biomedical applications, the researchers, led by Harvard's Charles Lieber, explain in the current paper. "However, direct 3D interpenetration of electronics within these structures is limited by the intrinsic thin-film supporting substrates."

Basically, it's not really feasible to inject something that can't conform to a needle in the first place, nor is a rigid device going to be able to interact with the brain in any way resembling how the brain interacts with itself. The brain is, you know, squishy.

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Image: Lieber et al

"We have shown that mesh electronics with widths more than 30 times the needle can be injected and maintain a high yield of active electronic devices," Lieber and co. write. "In the future, our new approach and results could be extended in several directions, including incorporation of multifunctional electronic devices and/or wireless interfaces to further increase the complexity of the injected electronics."

IRL applications of this stuff aren't distant by any stretch. In an accompanying Nature commentary, biophysicists Dae-Hyeong Kim and Youngsik Lee explain a bit further, writing:

Deformable electronics integrated with specific biological systems, also called soft bioelectronics, show potential as a solution to various clinical challenges. These include disease-specific bioelectronic device strategies, such as high-resolution brain mapping electronics for epilepsy, intracortical optogenetic stimulation devices for brain/computer interfacing, epicardial electrophysiology webs for arrhythmia, and electronic dura mater integrated with the spinal cord.

There are worse things than a brain injection. Probably.

It's done "stereotactically," which in humans means drilling a really tiny hole in the skull and then going from there. In the case of a brian tissue biopsy, the number one reason you'd be in such a situation, it's considered a minimally-invasive surgery and can be done on an outpatient basis. One has to assume that it's a bit less pleasant for a lab animal.

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