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The potential to treat disease by blocking and stimulating nerves directly, rather than through the administration of drugs, is attracting mounting interest. The approach may be effective for a range of non-infectious non-cancerous conditions including asthma, heart conditions, diabetes, obesity and irritable bowel syndrome. nanotechweb.org caught up with some of the speakers at innoLAE 2017 to find out the latest progress with the approach.

Therapeutic bioelectronics has already won sufficient faith with pharmaceutical giant GSK to team up with tech company Verily Life Sciences LLC – formerly Google Life Sciences – to establish Galvani Bioelectronics. Together they have committed to a £540m investment (55% GSK/45% Verily) to explore this approach over the next seven years. Galvani Biolelectronics currently has 21 projects underway investigating 17 different interfacing approaches.

Nerves vary in size from a few hundred micrometres to a few micrometres, and hundreds of nanometres in the small animals used for investigative studies. The smaller nerves closer to organs are the primary targets for achieving specific therapeutic outcomes, such as stimulating lung bronchi nerves to dilate for treating asthma.

One of the main challenges for bioelectronics is designing safe neural interfaces, in particular minimizing mechanical mismatch. As Galvani Bioelectronics principal engineer Sebastien Ouchouche told nanotechweb.org at innoLAE 2017 last month, “Mechanical mismatch is a big risk because it can ultimately lead to nerve damage or electrode failure.” He emphasized the need for soft, compliant substrates to minimize mechanical mismatch.

Nanoprinting neural interfaces

John Hardy

Printed logo

Also at innoLAE 2017, the University of Lancaster’s John Hardy presented some of their work in the search for new materials with analogous properties to tissues for use in neural interfaces, among them polypyrrole. The Lancaster researchers had begun by drawing polypyrrole fibres by hand, but found they had more success using the nanoscribe equipment at Lancaster.

Ouchouche shares Hardy’s optimism about the role of nanoscale 3D printers, explaining that they could potentially produce micro-neural interface cuffs in 2–3 minutes. He adds, “This could allow you to see what design you need to produce and print the parts you need during the surgery itself.”

Neural interfacing at a stretch

Strechability is another very desirable neural interface feature as nerves can be associated with structures that can grow by up to 20% with aging. There have been various reports of stretchable materials integrating nanostructures for electronic functionality, but so far these are not stretchable enough.

innoLAE 2017 was attended by delegates from across the world, and is organized by the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Large-Area Electronics, a partnership between CIKC at the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College, the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating at Swansea University and the Organic Materials Innovation Centre at the University of Manchester.

About the author

Anna Demming is online editor of nanotechweb.org