bioelectronics

Bioelectronic medicine are an emerging class of treatments aiming to modulate body nervous activity to correct pathological conditions and restore health. Recently, it was shown that the high frequency electrical neuromodulation of the carotid sinus nerve (CSN), a small branch of the glossopharyngeal nerve that connects the carotid body (CB) to the brain, restores metabolic function in type 2 diabetes (T2D) animal models highlighting its potential as a new therapeutic modality to treat metabolic diseases in humans...

Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) have emerged as promising candidates for various fields, including bioelectronics, neuromorphic computing, biosensors, and wearable electronics. OECTs operate in aqueous solutions, exhibit high amplification properties, and offer ion-to-electron signal transduction. The OECT channel consists of a conducting polymer, with PEDOT:PSS receiving the most attention to date. While PEDOT:PSS is highly conductive, and benefits from optimized protocols using secondary dopants and detergents, new p-type and n-type polymers are emerging with desirable material properties...

Breathing is an important physiological activity of human body, which not only reflects the state of human movement, but also is one of the important health indicators. Breathing can change the concentration of water molecules, so monitoring humidity has gradually become a hot topic in modern research. In this study, a humidity sensing composite film with high sensitivity and short response time was made by using the mixture of graphene oxide (GO) and bacterial cellulose (BC) with simple dry film-forming method...

Nanozymes have been widely used in the field of biosensing owing to their high stability, low cost, adjustable catalytic activity, and convenient modification. However, achieving high selectivity and sensitivity simultaneously in nanozyme-based colorimetric sensing remains a major challenge. Nanozymes are nanomaterials with enzyme-simulating activity that are often used as solid-phase adsorbents for sample pretreatment. Our design strategy integrated sample pretreatment function into the nanozyme through separation and enrichment, thereby improving the selectivity and sensitivity of nanozyme-based colorimetric biosensing...

Electroceuticals have evolved beyond devices manipulating neuronal signaling for symptomatic treatment, becoming more precise and disease modulating and expanding beyond the nervous system. These advancements promise transformative applications in arthritis, cancer treatment, tissue regeneration, and more. Here, we discuss these recent advances and offer insights for future research.

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Early diagnosis of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases is important to effectively prevent carcinogenesis. Capsule endoscopy (CE) can address the pain caused by wired endoscopy in GI diagnosis. However, existing CE approaches have difficulty effectively diagnosing lesions that do not exhibit obvious morphological changes. In addition, the current CE cannot achieve wireless energy supply and attitude control at the same time. Here, we successfully developed a novel near-infrared fluorescence capsule endoscopy (NIFCE) that can stimulate and capture near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence images to specifically identify subtle mucosal microlesions and submucosal lesions while capturing conventional white light (WL) images to detect lesions with significant morphological changes...

Pathogenic gut microbiota is responsible for a few debilitating gastrointestinal diseases. While the host immune cells do produce extracellular vesicles to counteract some deleterious effects of the microbiota, the extracellular vesicles are of insufficient doses and at unreliable exposure times. Here we use mechanical stimulation of hydrogel-embedded macrophage in a bioelectronic controller that on demand boost production of up to 20 times of therapeutic extracellular vesicles to ameliorate the microbes' deleterious effects in vivo...

Skin-interfaced microfluidic patch has become a reliable device for sweat collection and analysis. However, the intractable problems of emptying the microchannel for reuse, and the channel's volumetric capacity limited by the size of the patch, directly hinder the practical application of sweat sensors. Herein, we report an adaptively resettable microfluidic sweat patch (Art-Sweat patch) capable of continuously monitoring both sweat rate (0.2-4.0 μL min- 1 ) and total ionic charge concentration (10-200 mmol L-1 )...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for rapid and sensitive detection of SARS-CoV-2. Here, we report an ultrasensitive SARS-CoV-2 immunosensor by integration of an AlGaN/GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) and anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike protein antibody. The AlGaN/GaN HEMT immunosensor has demonstrated the capability to detect SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins at an impressively low concentration of 10-22  M. The sensor was also applied to pseudoviruses and SARS-CoV-2 ΔN virions that display the Spike proteins with a single virion particle sensitivity...

The recent global upsurge in Monkeypox virus (MPXV) outbreaks underscores the critical need for rapid and precise diagnostic solutions, particularly in resource-constrained settings. The gold standard diagnostic method, qRT-PCR, is hindered by its time-consuming nature, requirement for nucleic acid purification, expensive equipment, and the need for highly trained personnel. Traditional CRISPR/Cas fluorescence assays, relying on trans-cleavage of ssDNA/RNA reporters labeled with costly fluorophores and quenchers, pose challenges that limit their widespread application, especially for point-of-care testing (POCT)...

As a heavy metal pollutant, Cd2+ often enters the human body through the food chain causing great harm to human health. Whole-cell biosensor is an emerging technology for rapid on-site detection of heavy metals with the advantages of inexpensive, fast to mass-produce, and strong in anti-interference resistance, but suffering from insatisfactory specificity. In this study, a strategy of Adjacent Site Saturation Mutation (ASSM) was designed to improve the specificity of transcription factor CadR, which acted as the recognition element and determined the specificity of whole cell Cd2+ biosensors...

Understanding the factors underpinning device switching times is crucial for the implementation of organic electrochemical transistors in neuromorphic computing, bioelectronics and real-time sensing applications. Existing models of device operation cannot explain the experimental observations that turn-off times are generally much faster than turn-on times in accumulation mode organic electrochemical transistors. Here, using operando optical microscopy, we image the local doping level of the transistor channel and show that turn-on occurs in two stages-propagation of a doping front, followed by uniform doping-while turn-off occurs in one stage...

In this study, a surface functionalization approach by covalent grafting of an organic thin film containing hydroxyl groups on TiN surface via electroreduction of diazonium salts "4-(2-hydroxyethyl)benzenediazonium salt" is presented. Cyclic voltammetry procedures were carried out at the potential ranges of -0.8 V~0.5 V (vs Ag/AgCl) with varying numbers of potential cycles (i.e., 5, 25, and 50 cycles) in order to study the thickness of modification layer. Then, the electrochemical properties, surface morphology, and chemical structures of the sample before and after modifications were investigated via multiple characterization techniques, such as cyclic voltammetry (CV), atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), etc...

Psychiatric disorders are associated with serve disturbances in cognition, emotional control, and/or behavior regulation, yet few routine clinical tools are available for the real-time evaluation and early-stage diagnosis of mental health. Abnormal levels of relevant biomarkers may imply biological, neurological, and developmental dysfunctions of psychiatric patients. Exploring biosensors that can provide rapid, in-situ, and real-time monitoring of psychiatric biomarkers is therefore vital for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of mental disorders...

BACKGROUND: Predicting of future blood glucose (BG) concentration is important for diabetes control. Many automatic BG monitoring or controlling systems use BG predictors. The accuracy of the prediction for long prediction time is a major factor affecting the performance of the control system. The predicted BG can be used for glycemia management in the form of early hypoglycemic/hyperglycemic alarms or adjusting insulin injections. Recent developments in continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices open new opportunities for glycemia management of diabetic patients...

Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection correlates closely with gastric diseases such as gastritis, ulcers, and cancer, influencing more than half of the world's population. Establishing a rapid, precise, and automated platform for H. pylori diagnosis is an urgent clinical need and would significantly benefit therapeutic intervention. Recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA)-CRISPR recently emerged as a promising molecular diagnostic assay due to its rapid detection capability, high specificity, and mild reaction conditions...

Simple and reliable profiling of tumor-derived exosomes (TDEs) holds significant promise for the early detection of cancer. Nonetheless, this remains challenging owing to the substantial heterogeneity and low concentration of TDEs. Herein, we devised an accurate and highly sensitive electrochemical sensing strategy for TDEs via simultaneously targeting exosomal mucin 1 (MUC1) and programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1). This approach employs high-affinity aptamers as specific recognition elements, utilizes rolling circle amplification and DNA nanospheres as effective bridges and signal amplifiers, and leverages methylene blue (MB) and doxorubicin (DOX) as robust signal reporters...

Lateral flow immunoassays (LFIAs) are an essential and widely used point-of-care test for medical diagnoses. However, commercial LFIAs still have low sensitivity and specificity. Therefore, we developed an automatic ultrasensitive dual-color enhanced LFIA (DCE-LFIA) by applying an enzyme-induced tyramide signal amplification method to a double-antibody sandwich LFIA for antigen detection. The DCE-LFIA first specifically captured horseradish peroxidase (HRP)-labeled colored microspheres at the Test line, and then deposited a large amount of tyramide-modified signals under the catalytic action of HRP to achieve the color superposition...

Human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) are a promising cell source for cardiac regenerative medicine and in vitro modeling. However, hPSC-CMs exhibit immature structural and functional properties compared with adult cardiomyocytes. Various electrical, mechanical, and biochemical cues have been applied to enhance hPSC-CM maturation but with limited success. In this work, we investigated the potential application of the semiconducting polymer poly{[N,N'-bis(2-octyldodecyl)-naphthalene-1,4,5,8-bis(dicarboximide)-2,6-diyl]-alt-5,5'-(2,2'-bithiophene)} (P(NDI2OD-T2)) as a light-sensitive material to stimulate hPSC-CMs optically...