U.S. Nanomedicine Centre to Study Biobattery Production

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The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute has granted $6.5 million US for the development of four nanomedicine centres, one of which will be devoted to developing biobatteries for implantable medical devices.

The National Center for Design of Biometric Nanoconductors will be led by Eric G. Jakobsson, PhD, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, IL). The project will focus on designing, modelling, synthesizing and fabricating nanomedical devices. The devices will be based on natural and synthetic ion transporters, proteins that control ion motion across the membranes of living cells.

Biobatteries — which generate electric power for a variety of medical devices, such as artificial retinas — will be the group’s initial focus. The research team also plans to construct sensors, power sources, energy transducers and osmotic pumps, either for research purposes or as the basis for implantable medical device development.

The multidisciplinary, multi-institutional project brings together researchers from: University of Southern California’s Doheny Eye Institute (Los Angeles, CA), the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago, IL), Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM), University of California, Davis (Davis, CA), University of Oxford (Oxford, U.K.), Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN) and Cornell University’s Weill Medical College (New York, NY).