Nanowires: Development of Polymer-Based Electrodes for Chronic Neural Recordings In Vivo and In Vitro

Conducting polymers have great potential as new materials for electrode construction. Compared to traditional metal or glass electrodes, polymers such as polypyrrole are flexible and highly biocompatible, and they can be made extremely thin. These properties will be especially valuable for the construction of high-density electrode arrays that can be implanted chronically in the brain. We are fabricating polypyrrole nanowires and exploring their use as intracortical recording electrodes. Ultimately we hope to develop a new generation of electrodes that can be stably implanted in the brain for long periods of time, both for research and clinical applications.

We are also working to produce polypyrrole electrode arrays on a tissue culture surface. These arrays will be used to deliver patterned stimulation to neurons in culture, in order to explore synaptic plasticity rules and neural network effects in vitro. Such a system may ultimately form the basis of a new platform for drug discovery, by allowing high-throughput screening of chemicals that modify the properties of neural networks in therapeutically useful ways.