Project description
Understanding how bioelectronic materials operate
Bioelectronics refers to the field that combines electronics and biology knowledge into diagnostic and treatment devices such as those monitoring glucose levels in diabetic patients. Such devices require bioinspired interfaces that contain organic materials and microelectronics. The key objective of the EU-funded A-TO-B project is to better understand organic bioelectronic materials and provide fundamental knowledge on their structure and function. Researchers will work beyond existing simulation models to gain insight into how certain materials exhibit better performance. The project will offer new tools for the bioelectronics field to assess physical and computational aspects of existing or novel materials.
Objective
The goal of bioelectronics is to interface electrical devices with living tissues, cells and biological fluids to achieve a range of functions: from monitoring biological activity to controlling neuron signals and administering drugs. The materials developed to build these interfaces are typically organic materials containing polymeric conjugated chains combined with ionic components in water. At the moment there is no clear structure-function theory for these materials and no microscopic understanding of how they operate or why some of them perform better. The overall goal of this proposal is (i) to lay the foundations for atomistic modelling of organic bioelectronics materials, (ii) to derive structure-property relations from the study a range of experimentally relevant systems and (iii) to address some of the most pressing scientific questions arising in the field. These objectives cannot be achieved with any of the existing methodologies. The physics of ion dynamics coupled with the dynamics of very fast electrons is new and outside the capabilities of current classical or quantum simulation tools. The materials are chemically too complex and diverse to simulate a sufficient number of them with the common methods of soft matter simulations. This proposal addresses both the physical aspects (developing a new method to describe ion-electron coupled dynamics) and the computational aspects (devising a scheme for accelerated simulations of polymeric materials), providing this research field with a robust and predictive theory.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
L69 7ZX Liverpool
United Kingdom