There might actually be a tiny–or nano, rather–electronic device that can be injected directly into your brain or other parts of the body.
Why a nano electronic injectable?
Injecting nano electronics into your body might be newest in beneficial scientific procedures. Imagine that instead of a vaccination, the syringe gives you a shot of electronics instead. The brain has been implanted with electronics in the past because deep brain stimulation has been used to treat a range of brain disorders for decades.
Featured in Nature Nanotechnology, a Harvard research group wants to introduce to the world a thin mesh that is able to track brain activity. Charles Lieber’s Lab designed this little device to treat everything from neurodegenerative disorders to paralysis to Parkinson’s. T Lieber, the Mark Hymer Jr. Professor of Chemistry and an international team of researchers are responsible for developing this method of fabricating nanoscale electronic scaffolds that can be injected via syringe.
Cranial Injection Rather Than Cranial Surgical Implant
Lieber holds, “if you want to study the brain or develop the tools to explore the brain-machine interface, you need to stick something into the body.” It is said to be less invasive than implants. Think cranial injection rather than cranial surgical implant.
Injectable electronics feel like it is not there at all. It is way less crude and way, way more flexible thanks to its polymer thread material.
It can be stuck onto both the organs of both humans and animal. One could think of them as electronic tattoos as they can help track your heart and breathing. Now, it is just being stuck onto skin. Later, however, the need to move toward implants might lead to some issues.
Nanotechnology Scaffolding for The Brain
Luckily, the mesh that was created out of thin polymer and metal threads has the ability to do the job electrodes do– only it integrates into the brain, like a scaffolding cells can attach themselves to. This thread structure actually does well to create a solid connection that enables tracking and stimulating specific neurons. This enables precise measurements over specific regions of the brains. Needless to say, also an enabler of profound discovery in the world of neuroscience.
The mesh can also be rolled into smaller widths even giving it the flexibility to be loaded into a 100-micrometer glass needle. Once the mesh is infected into a part of the brain, it can unroll itself and settle into the area of the brain it sits upon. In order to test this, researchers tried this theory on synthetic gel. They were able to demonstrate that it would unroll and settle into the brain-like structure used for the experiment.
Next, the injected the mesh onto live lab mice. In the mice, the mesh had spread out when they were checked five weeks after the injection. The neuroimaging came up with healthy neurons surrounding the mice participant’s brains. It was also shown that researchers would be able to map brain activity when connecting to a set of these tiny wires.
Nanotechnology and The Brain
The team aims to build greater scaffolding in the form of larger meshes with various sensor types. They plan to inject that mesh into newborn mice to monitor how it unrolled as they grew so they can better understand how the body reacts to these electronic injectables. The journal Nature also reports on a wireless interface in the works. Most will be interested to know that human tests are still a long, way away. Still, this research takes a step in helping us put together pieces of the puzzle of the unfathomably mysterious brain.
Are you able to trick the brain into waking up?:
U.S.: What a Mesh Nanotechnology Can Do for The Brain
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