Harvard: Neuronlike brain implants may help treat disease, mental illness
Like a well-guarded fortress, the human brain attacks intruders on sight. Foreign objects, including neural probes used to study and treat the brain, do not last long. But now, researchers have designed a probe that looks, acts, and feels so much like a real neuron that the brain cannot identify it as an imposter. According to Charles M. Lieber, this breakthrough “literally blurs the ever-present and clear dissimilarities in properties between man-made and living systems” — in other words, between human and machine. Lieber, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor at Harvard, and his lab members are authors on a new paper published in Nature Materials that presents a bioinspired design for neural probes. Implanted directly into brain tissue, the probes are designed to survive as long as possible in the organ’s warm, humid, inhospitable environment. Sensors hidden within protective casings send data back to researchers about how and when...