Dion Khodagholy, assistant professor of electrical engineering, is focused on developing bioelectronic devices that are not only fast, sensitive, biocompatible, soft, and flexible, but also have long-term stability in physiological environments such as the human body. Such devices would greatly improve human health, from monitoring in-home wellness to diagnosing and treating neuropsychiatric diseases, including epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. The design of current devices has been severely constrained by the rigid, non-biocompatible electronic components needed for safe and effective use, and solving this challenge would open the door to a broad range of exciting new therapies.
In collaboration with Jennifer N. Gelinas, Department of Neurology, and the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University Iriving Medical Center, Khodagholy has recently published two papers, the first in Nature Materials on ion-driven soft and organic transistors that he and Gelinas have designed to record individual neurons and perform real-time computation that could facilitate diagnosis and monitoring of neurological disease.
The second paper, published in Science Advances, demonstrates a soft, biocompatible smart composite–an organic mixed-conducting particulate material (MCP)–that enables the creation of complex electronic components which traditionally require several layers and materials. It also enables easy and effective electronic bonding between soft materials, biological tissue, and rigid electronics. Because it is fully biocompatible and has controllable electronic properties, MCP can non-invasively record muscle action potentials from the surface of arm and, in collaboration with Sameer Sheth and Ashwin Viswanathan at Baylor College of Medicine’s department of neurosurgery, large-scale brain activity during neurosurgical procedures to implant deep brain stimulation electrodes.
“Instead of having large implants encapsulated in thick metal boxes to protect the body and electronics from each other, such as those used in pacemakers, and cochlear and brain implants, we could do so much more if our devices were smaller, flexible, and inherently compatible with our body environment,” says Khodagholy, who directs the Translational NeuroElectronics Lab at Columbia Engineering. “Over the past several years, my group has been working to use unique properties of materials to develop novel electronic devices that allow efficient interaction with biological substrates–specifically neural networks and the brain.”
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