Project description
Peptide nanotechnology enables energy harvesting and storage for implantable devices
The human body is an excellent source of all kinds of energy including thermal, electrical and mechanical. Harvesting energy from the body for the body to use in implantable biomedical devices would eliminate the reliance on problematic lithium-ion batteries. The European Research Council-funded PepZoPower project will develop a biocompatible energy harvesting and storage device: relying on peptide nanotechnology, it will integrate the coordinator’s patent-protected piezoelectric and energy storage peptide-based supramolecular structures. Piezoelectric peptide-based assemblies will harvest mechanical energy from the human body and convert it into electric energy. The harvested mechanical energy will be stored by a biocompatible peptide-based supercapacitor. Applications could include cardiac defibrillators and spinal cord stimulators.
Objective
Over the past decades, implantable biomedical systems have greatly advanced, offering previously unavailable therapeutic options for millions of patients worldwide. Such applications most commonly utilize conventional lithium-ion batteries as the energy source. However, while readily providing adequate energetic performance, lithium-ion batteries are inflexible, rigid, may contain toxic substances, and require periodic replacement surgeries due to their limited capacity, posing both health risks and an economical burden. Here, aiming to address these issues, we will develop PepZoPower, a biocompatible energy harvesting, and storage device designed for biomedical applications. Energy harvesting will be facilitated by highly-efficient piezoelectric peptide-based assemblies allowing to harvest mechanical energy from the human body and convert it into electric energy. The harvested mechanical energy will be stored by a biocompatible peptide-based supercapacitor, thus giving rise to an autonomous, miniaturized, controllable, and biocompatible power device with adequate performance and mechanical properties. This ambitious goal will be achieved by utilizing our patent-protected piezoelectric and energy storage peptide-based supramolecular structures, to be incorporated into an integrated device. The performance of each layer will be optimized and the integrated PepZoPower device will be validated to verify efficient incorporation of the two components. We envision the breakthrough PepZoPower technology to serve as the basis for the next leap toward biocompatible, soft, miniaturized, light-weight and morphologically-controllable implantable devices. This will pave the way towards post-project commercial exploitation of the PepZoPower system, which will be further developed by a spin-off company to be integrated into implantable devices ranging from cardiac defibrillators to spinal cords stimulators, opening a huge market opportunity for this radically new technology.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectrical engineeringelectric energy
- natural scienceschemical scienceselectrochemistryelectric batteries
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomolecules
- engineering and technologynanotechnology
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectrical engineeringpiezoelectrics
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept GrantsHost institution
69978 Tel Aviv
Israel