John Rogers, professor of materials science at the University of Illinois, is one of the greatest innovators of our time.
Last year I wrote about the electronic tattoos developed by Rogers and his team and I speculated at the time we could be witnessing a black swan moment for the future of health care technology.
Just last month I covered the announcement that Rogers and his colleagues have developed electronic sutures which can both monitor wounds for infection and provide heat to kill the infection before it becomes a bigger problem.
Now Rogers, in a paper published in the journal Science, has unveiled what he calls “transient electronics”, which are made of silicon, magnesium and silk, that can be implanted subcutaneously for a specific purpose and once they have served that purpose will automatically dissolve harmlessly into the human body.
“From the earliest days of the electronics industry, a key design goal has been to build devices that last forever–with completely stable performance. But if you think about the opposite possibility–devices that are engineered to physically disappear in a controlled and programmed manner–then other, completely different kinds of application opportunities open up,” Rogers said in a university announcement.
One potential application described in the paper published in Science is for using the implants to fight surgical site infections, which are one of the leading causes of readmission into the hospital following a surgical procedure. This is accomplished by providing heat subcutaneously to the wound. Amazingly, the heat generated by the device is powered wirelessly with a special antenna, which can be exposed to radio-frequency radiation from an external source through the skin.
“The different applications that we are considering require different operating time frames,” Rogers said. “A medical implant that is designed to deal with potential infections from surgical site incisions is only needed for a couple of weeks. But for a consumer electronic device, you’d want it to stick around at least for a year or two. The ability to use materials science to engineer those time frames becomes a critical aspect in design.”
Other potential applications that have been suggested by team members include environmental monitors, such as wireless sensors dispersed around the site of an oil spill, which degrade over time to eliminate negative environmental impact. Another is for use in the manufacturing of consumer electronics systems or sub-components that are compostable to erase vast amounts of electronic waste generated by devices that are frequently updated.
“We are thinking about marrying this technology with existing devices, for example the Total Artificial Heart, which was developed here at the UA,” said Dr. Marvin J. Slepian, a practicing cardiologist and professor of medicine at the UA Sarver Heart Center with a joint appointment in the UA department of biomedical engineering. “It’s a life-saving system that has worked really well, but in a sense, we’re flying blind. After the device is implanted, we set it to a certain pumping rate and monitor the patient and see how they’re doing.”
“Ideally, we’d like to be able to implant transient sensors along with the device, for example pressure sensors that keep track of the blood pressure in the pulmonary artery or the aorta for the first two weeks after surgery. This would help immensely with the management of such patients,” he said.
The biodegradable technology came out of previous research conducted by Rogers and his collaborators on stretchable electronic circuits that can be placed on balloon catheters for cardiac patients. The discovery of a flexible, programmable, and self-destructable medical implant with the capabilities described in this paper is a truly awesome development with huge potential implications for the future of medicine.
“It’s a new concept, so there are lots of opportunities, many of which we probably have not even identified yet” Rogers said. “We’re very excited. These findings open up entirely new areas of application, and associated directions for research in electronics.”
