Functional materials for peripheral organ modulation
The field of bioelectronic medicine seeks to develop approaches for modulating electrogenic cells within peripheral organs, to advance translational applications to repair organ dysfunction and its connection to the nervous system in health and disease. The key challenges are allowing longitudinal stimulation, minimally invasiveness, minimal damage to the surrounding tissue, deep organ stimulation, specificity and temporal control. Therefore, there is a growing demand for developing new functional materials with new technologies that fit the current biomedical research. In this talk, I will present a novel strategy to use iron oxide nanoparticles that demonstrate hysteretic heating under weak alternating magnetic fields, to trigger heat-sensitive ion channels, endogenously expressed in deep organs. I will demonstrate the use of the magnetothermal switch in biological applications starting from magnetic coils and materials design, through in vitro demonstration and in vivo application.
