Tissue-like Implant to Bring Electricity to Devices Inside the Body

Imagine someone charging their pacemaker not with the usual surgery but with just a brief prick of a thin needle. That could soon be possible with a groundbreaking sponge-like material called an Implantable Bioelectronic Outlet (IBO) created by UC Irvine researchers.

The IBO is designed to live inside the body and aims to enable devices that are implanted in the body, like pacemakers, to be recharged without surgery. It also can deliver electric stimulation to and transmit digital data from the body. A team led by Dion Khodagholy, UCI associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, created the IBO. [The team includes Kimberly Gokoffski, MD, PhD, and Jennifer Gelinas, MD, PhD, from the UC Irvine School of Medicine.] The research tests on small and large animals has just been published in Science Advances.

“The IBO is able to very effectively deliver stimulation similar to as if you directly connected wires,” said Khodagholy. “This is very exciting because not only can it can be used for diagnostic purposes, but perhaps it can also facilitate therapeutics where specific doses of stimulation are needed per day.”

Khodagholy aims to use the IBO to deliver electric therapies to patients for neuropsychiatric, cardiac, arthritic and inflammatory disorders as well as for cancer therapy.

Read the full article, posted by the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering.