FME Talk by Prof. George Malliaras - Materials and Devices for Bioelectronic Medicine

Neurological conditions affect one in six people, imposing significant health, economic and societal burden. Bioelectronic medicine aims to restore or replace neurological function with the help of implantable electronic devices. Unfortunately, significant technological limitations prohibit these devices from reaching patients at scale, as implants are bulky, require invasive implantation procedures, elicit a pronounced foreign body response, and show poor treatment specificity and off-target effects. Over the past decade, new devices made using methods from the microelectronics industry have been shown to overcome these limitations. Recent literature provides powerful demonstrations of thin film implants that are miniaturised, ultra-conformal, stretchable, multiplexed, integrated with different sensors and actuators, bioresorbable, and minimally invasive. I will discuss the state-of-the-art of these new technologies and the barriers that need to be overcome to reach patients at scale.

George Malliaras is the Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. He leads the Bioelectronics Laboratory, an interdisciplinary group of scientists, engineers and clinicians who translate advances in electronics to better tools for healthcare. George received a BS from the Aristotle University, Greece, a PhD from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and did a postdoc at the IBM Almaden Research Center, USA. Before joining Cambridge, he was a faculty member at Cornell University in the USA, where he also served as the Director of the Cornell NanoScale Facility, and at the School of Mines of St. Etienne in France. His research has been recognized with awards from the European Academy of Sciences, the Materials Research Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, the US National Science Foundation, and DuPont. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Linköping (Sweden), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Materials Research Society, Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences. He serves as a Deputy Editor of Science Advances.