What's all this about edible electronics?

Raquel Welch, cutting edge medical treatment and Carnegie Mellon scientists:  it's all here

Edible electronic devices – the words conjure thought-provoking images: licorice IPods perhaps or maybe Blackberries tasting of…well…blackberries.  How about chicken flavored DVD players or cheddar cheese GPS devices?

Well, forget it. You should be thinking more along the lines of that old 1960s Raquel Welch movie “Fantastic Voyage” if you want a more accurate bead on what the folks at Carnegie Mellon University are cooking up.

In “Fantastic Voyage” scientists miniaturized a specially designed submarine down to one micrometer in size with a crew of folks inside. The sub was then injected in some poor man’s blood stream. Raquel and a crew of other folks are supposed to drive the sub through the man’s various organs to zap a blood clot with a fancy laser device thus saving his life.

Raquel and company have a rough time of it. An arteriovenous fistula forces the sub to take a detour through the heart, where, in order to avoid turbulence which would destroy the craft, a cardiac arrest has to be induced. 

Then, when they go though the inner ear everybody outside the guy’s body must remain perfectly silent to prevent another turbulence threat to the sub. Then, it’s off to the poor guy’s lungs to replenish the sub’s oxygen supply.

Well, they eventually accomplish their mission and zap the clot after enduring a saboteur’s hijinx and some cold war plot devices. The big problem with the “Fantastic Voyage” scenario was that people are involved.  What if you didn’t need to miniaturize a full-scale submarine to carry pesky smelly people into a body to practice medicine from the inside out? 

Scientists argued long before men climbed into those tiny space capsules in the 1960s that people really weren’t necessary to explore space. It could all be done with machines.  It appears like the same can be said of efforts to practice medicine on people from the inside out. Why figure out how to miniaturize a vessel to carry people inside a body when you can just build little devices to go where you want to perform various assignments? That’s where the Carnegie Mellon folks enter the picture.

 “We are creating electronically-active medical devices that can be implanted in the body,’’ said Christopher Bettinger, an assistant professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at CMU in a University press release. “The idea is for a patient to consume a pill that encapsulates the device.’’

Now that’s an edible electronic device.

Jay Whitacre, a professor in Materials Science and Engineering, is working with Bettinger. The CMU brainiac’s are not only developing medical devices that fit inside a pill that can be swallowed by patients and whisked to specific sites to tackle specific problems, they are also cooking up edible power sources that can keep those medical devices inside the body humming along and doing their jobs.

“Our design involves flexible polymer electrodes and a sodium ion electrochemical cell which allows us to fold the mechanism into an edible pill that encapsulates the device,’’ said Bettinger.

Once the battery packaging is in place, Bettinger’s team would activate the battery. The CMU folks say the edible batteries could power biosensors to measure biomarkers or monitor gastric problems. The battery also could be used to stimulate damaged tissue or help in targeted drug delivery for certain types of cancer.

“There’s so much out there we can do with this novel approach to medical devices,’’ said Bettinger, who recently received a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for his work on advanced materials for next generation implanted medical devices.  

It has taken more than a decade to whip up the edible electronics approach and Bettinger indicated some of the innovations in the hopper could use newer synthetic materials that mimic the natural properties of soft tissue and biodegradable electronics that could usher in a new era of electronically active implants. 

So if someone asks you to invest in a new technology to miniaturize submarines for injection into human bodies for the purpose of treating medical conditions, better hold off. The CMU guys are way ahead of that idea.