An implant to better track the brain chemicals become rogue after a neurotrauma / ScienceDaily

For the treatment to improve, researchers must master this peak by a fraction of a second and closely monitor its destruction process.

Purdue University engineers have developed a tiny, flexible sensor that is faster and more accurate than previous attempts to track this chemical called glutamate. The sensor, an implantable device on the spinal cord, is primarily a research tool for testing animal models, but could be used in the future as a clinical means to monitor the effectiveness of a drug for treatment neurotrauma or brain disease.

The work of the group appears in a future issue of Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

"When you feel like you have a fever, it does not matter when you check your temperature – it will probably be the same for several hours, but a glutamate peak is so fast that if you do not catch it at that time, you miss any opportunity to get data, "said Riyi Shi, a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at Purdue's Department of Basic Medical Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering.

An impact, such as a car accident or a football tackle, can injure the spinal cord – as well as the nerve structures carrying glutamate, which sends signals to excite nervous tissue for functions such as lymphatic vessels. learning and memorizing.

Damaged nerve structures mean that glutamate fillers infiltrate into spaces outside the cells, exciting and damaging them. Brain diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, also have high levels of glutamate.

Until now, devices have not been sensitive enough to detect glutamate, fast enough to capture its peak or affordable enough for long-term research projects.

Purdue researchers are tackling these problems through implantable sensors with 3D printing and laser micro-machining – processes already used regularly in the laboratory and in the laboratory. industry.

"We wanted to create a very fast and cost-effective way to build these sensors so that they could easily provide researchers with a way to measure glutamate levels in vivo," said Hugh Lee, an badistant professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue. implantable microtechnologies.

This technique allows researchers to quickly change the size, shape and orientation of the sensors, and then test them on animal models without going through the more expensive microfabrication process.

Measuring in vivo levels would help researchers study how spinal cord injury and the development of brain disease develop.

"What is the magnitude of the problem of a migraine? Is there too much glutamate behind the pain, or is the system that cleans glutamate broken down?" Said Shi.

The researchers implanted the device into the spinal cord of an animal model, and then injured it to observe a tip. The device immediately captured the tip, while for current devices, researchers had to wait 30 minutes to obtain data after damaging the spinal cord.

In the future, researchers plan to create a way for biosensors to self-eliminate inflammatory cells that the body recruits to protect itself. These cells usually form a fibrous capsule around the biosensor, which blocks its sensitivity.

The technology could also allow more sensors to be implanted along the spinal cord, which would help researchers determine the glutamate propagation distance and its speed.

The researchers filed a patent application for this device with the Purdue Research Foundation's Technology Commercialization Office. The work was funded by the Samsung Advanced Institute's global research program, the National Institutes of Health, and funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-1726865.

This research aligns with the celebration of Purdue's giant leaps, recognizing the university's global advances in health, longevity and quality of life as part of Purdue's 150th anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the Celebration Ideas Festival, which aims to introduce Purdue as an intellectual center for solving concrete problems.

A YouTube video is available at https://youtu.be/hyn9SM1wdz0.