IMG Member Ladan Jiracek recently presented his work with Dr. Jack Judy at the NanoFlorida conference on March 4-5! His presentation was titled, “Thinned Liquid Crystal Polymer for Tissue Engineered Electric Neural Interfaces (TEENI)”. Thank you for representing IMG so well!
IMG Member Ladan Jiracek recently presented at the Society for Neuroscience Conference in San Diego, California! He presented his work, “Tissue-Engineered Electronic Nerve Interfaces (TEENI): Improved Design, Fabrication, and Packaging Using Aggressive In Vitro Reliability Testing”. Thank you for representing IMG so well!
For several decades implantable bioelectronic neural interfaces have provided significant health benefits for patients suffering from various neurological diseases, deficits, or injuries. As the channel counts have increased, often so to do the therapeutic benefits of neuromodulation-based therapy. However, the lack of development of implantable connector technology for high-channel-count implants is limiting their successful development and translation to clinical trials. Existing commercial implant connector technology is limited to low channel counts (8 ch/lead).
Title " Next-Generation High-Channel-Density Implant-Connector Technology"
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Chronic and acute pain affect ~100 million people in the US and greatly increase national rates of morbidity, mortality, and disability. Pain not only negatively impacts individual lives in significant ways, it also imposes enormous national economic costs (up to $635B annually). The misuse of and addiction to opioids, such as prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids (e.g., fentanyl and carfentanil) is a serious national crisis. Currently ~130 Americans die of opioid overdose every day.
Chronic and acute pain affect ~100 million people in the US and greatly increase national rates of morbidity, mortality, and disability. Pain not only negatively impacts individual lives in significant ways, it also imposes enormous national economic costs (up to $635B annually). The misuse of and addiction to opioids, such as prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids (e.g., fentanyl and carfentanil) is a serious national crisis. Currently ~130 Americans die of opioid overdose every day.
For patients to benefit from state-of-the-art high-channel-count neural-interface technology, translatable implant packaging technology is needed to support it. Despite advances in implant electronics, batteries, enclosures, and even high-feedthrough-count and high-feedthrough-density headers, the lack of advancement in implant connector technology has imposed an often-unacceptable tradeoff between high interface channel count and the ability to disconnect and reconnect implanted interface leads from packaged and implanted electronics.
For amputees to exploit the full capability of state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs with rapid fine-movement control and high- resolution sensory percepts, a nerve-interface with a large number of reliable and independent channels of motor and sensory information is needed. The strongest signal sources in nerves are the nodes of Ranvier, which are essentially distributed randomly within a small 3-D volume. Thus, to comprehensively engage with the electrical activity of a nerve, a neural interface should interrogate a nerve in a 3-D volume of the same scale.
A Tissue Engineered Electronic Nerve Interface (TEENI) combines research areas including flexbile MEMS device fabrication, Hydrogels, Magnetic Microparticle Templating, Tissue Scaffolding, and Nerve Regeneration to develop a highly compliant and versatile interface for stimulating and recording the peripheral nerve with the potential for electrode density to scale in a truly 3-Dimensionsal fashion.
Congratulations to all of this year's IMG Award recipients, and a special thanks to all those who have contributed to our group. This year's kick-off meeting focused on the future of our group, and making it evident that "our most valuable asset is you". Let us continue working as a team and setting a precedent for research groups all around.
The IMG Awards recognize outstanding achievements and contributions of student members in our organization. The research award honors the exceptional academic impact the students have made in their field, and the service award acknowledges the hard work the students have put into improving and maintaining the quality of IMG.