Wiring The Brain With Nanotechnology
Wiring the Brain at the Nanoscale
Nanowires in blood vessels may help monitor, stimulate neurons in the brain
Neuroscientist Rudolfo Llinas and his colleagues envision an entire array of nanowires being connected to a catheter tube, which could then be guided through the circulatory system to the brain. Once there, the nanowires would spread into a kind of bouquet, branching out into tinier and tinier blood vessels until they reached specific locations. Each nanowire would then be used to record the electrical activity of a single nerve cells, or small groups of nerve cells.
By Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
July 7, 2005
Working with platinum nanowires 100 times thinner than a human hair--and using blood vessels as conduits to guide the wires--a team of U.S. and Japanese researchers has demonstrated a technique that may one day allow doctors to monitor individual brain cells and perhaps provide new treatments for neurological diseases such as Parkinson's.
Writing in the July 5, 2005, online issue of The Journal of Nanoparticle Research , the researchers explain it is becoming feasible to create nanowires far thinner than even the tiniest capillary vessels. That means nanowires could, in principle, be threaded through the circulatory system to any point in the body without blocking the normal flow of blood or interfering with the exchange of gasses and nutrients through the blood-vessel walls.
The team describes a proof-of-principle experiment in which they first guided platinum nanowires into the vascular system of tissue samples, and then successfully used the wires to detect the activity of individual neurons lying adjacent to the blood vessels.
Following the same logic, the researchers envision connecting an entire array of nanowires to a catheter tube that could then be guided through the circulatory system to the brain. Once there, the wires would spread into a "bouquet," branching out into tinier and tinier blood vessels until they reached specific locations. Each nanowire would then be used to record the electrical activity of a single nerve cell or small groups of them.
By providing information on the scale of individual nerve cells, or "neurons," the nanowire technique could bring the picture into much sharper focus.
One challenge is to precisely guide the nanowire probes to a predetermined spot through the thousands of branches in the brain's vascular system. One promising solution, the authors say, is to replace the platinum nanowires with new conducting polymer nanowires. Not only do the polymers conduct electrical impulses, conductive, they change shape in response to electric fields, which would allow the researchers to steer the nanowires through the brain's circulatory system. Polymer nanowires have the added benefit of being 20 to 30 times smaller than the platinum ones used in the reported laboratory experiments.
Media Contacts
Charles E. Blue, NSF (703) 292-5392 cblue@nsf.gov
M. Mitchell Waldrop, NSF (703) 292-7752 mwaldrop@nsf.gov
Program Contacts
Mihail C. Roco, NSF (703) 292-8301 mroco@nsf.gov
Principal Investigators
Rodolfo Llinas, New York University Medical Center (212) 263-5415 llinar01@popmail.med.nyu.edu
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