Neuroprosthetics aims at the development and intimate integration of artificial devices with the neural tissue, in order to restore impaired or lost human functions, such as sensory and motor behaviours (1,2). One of the main issues in Neuroprosthetics is represented by the materials used in electronic devices, such as metal and silicon, that are quite different from those exploited in biology by nature (3). Due to their structural kinship to biological building blocks and their ability to support electronic as well as ionic transport, carbon-based materials like conjugated polymers became attractive candidates for the translation between the electron-based world of electronics and the ion- and molecular-based world of biology. Their key enabling features, such as being biocompatible, biodegradable, soft and conformable, combined with their conductivity make them suitable for the design of devices with similar functionality as traditional electronics. Nevertheless, the main limiting factor of these materials is their natural biodegradability, which limits the device lifetime in the biological environment up to few months. As a consequence, the research effort in organic bio-electronics is now focused on evaluating new fabrication and encapsulation strategies to obtain highly biocompatible implants with an extended lifetime. On the contrary, transient bio-electronics is an emerging field exploiting standard inorganic electronic devices capable of disappearing in the body in a controlled manner, with a time-scale ranging from days to months or years (4,5). Transient devices could find application as implantable diagnostic or therapeutic tools in order to avoid long-term side effects and eliminate the need for retrieval. Edible Neuroprosthetics aims at diverting the paradigm in organic bio-electronics by exploiting the transient concept. Effectively, it benefits from the natural feature of conductive polymers to disappear in the body, in order to create highly compatible and transient prosthetic devices. In summary, Edible Neuroprosthetics exploits soft organic polymers as material of choice for the development of innovative implantable and dissolvable prosthetic devices.
[1] Zrenner, E. Sci Transl Med (2013).
[2] Borton, D. et al. Sci Transl Med (2013).
[3] Lanzani, G. Nature Materials (2014).
[4] Hwang, S.-W. et al. Science (2012).
[5] Hwang, S.-W. et al. Nano letters (2015).
