Dissolvable Films of Silk Fibroin for Ultrathin, Conformal Bio-Integrated Electronics

By Dae-Hyeong Kim, J. Viventi, J. Amsden, Jianliang Xiao, L. Vigeland, Yun-Soung Kim, Justin A. Blanco, B. Panilaitis, E. Frechette, D. Contreras and 7 more. Nature Materials, 2010

1,621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electronics that are capable of intimate, non-invasive integration with the soft, curvilinear surfaces of biological tissues offer important opportunities for diagnosing and treating disease and for improving brain-machine interfaces. This paper describes a material strategy for a type of bio-interfaced system that relies on ultrathin electronics supported by bioresorbable substrates of silk fibroin. Mounting such devices on tissue and then allowing the silk to dissolve and resorb initiates a spontaneous, conformal wrapping process driven by capillary forces at the biotic/abiotic interface. Specialized mesh designs and ultrathin forms for the electronics ensure minimal stresses on the tissue and highly conformal coverage, even for complex curvilinear surfaces, as confirmed by experimental and theoretical studies. In vivo, neural mapping experiments on feline animal models illustrate one mode of use for this class of technology. These concepts provide new capabilities for implantable or surgical devices.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/588dcefacbc8705819eb244ee01001b38d36be1e

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In Biomaterials

In Biomedical Engineering

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Flexible and Stretchable Electronics Paving the Way for Soft Robotics (2014, positive): “So far, biointegrated electronics have enabled exciting applications, including epidermal electronics for vital sign monitoring, 27,39,40 brain–computer interfaces, 41,42 electrocardiogram mapping devices, 43,44 and smart or minimally invasive surgical tools.”
Soft materials in neuroengineering for hard problems in neuroscience. (2015, methodology): “This ability to conform to curvilinear surfaces enables accurate neural recordings from the surface of the brain (Kim et al., 2010).”