UNM’s Research Opportunities for Science Educators (ROSE) Program offers science educators from all over New Mexico the chance to work with lab researchers in discovery-based research. One of this summer’s ROSE Scholars, Margaret Lewis, a 30-year teaching veteran from Las Vegas, NM, designed a 3D model to help UNM researchers on their project. The researchers, Jarek Maleszka, Ifigeneia Tsironi Tzinious, and Elvis Attah, work under Dr. Jean-Hubert Olivier in UNM’s Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology.
Maleszka describes their project as follows: “We want to develop more robust brain-machine interface coatings that can withstand the foreign body response when implanted into the brain. Since electrodes tend to be hard and stiff, there is a mechanical mismatch at the brain interface, causing the degradation of the brain electrodes to be quickened. Our strategy involves applying a hydrogel coating that can soften the material and make it closer in mechanical properties to the brain tissue surrounding it. Our coating also contains a drug that is also used to slow down the foreign body response. It does this by binding iron around the implant site to slow the reactions that cause the degradation of the wires. This is done by sustaining the release of the drug on the order of weeks, and overall prolonging the lifetime of the implant (so people don't need to get a brain surgery every week!).”
Lewis, who had previously brought her experience with 3D printing into her work as a Chemistry and Physics teacher, designed a new scaffold for loading the microwires in a way that makes the coating of them far easier. Lewis created a 3D model for this scaffold and Maleszka prepared it for printing on HSLIC’s 3D printer. Typically, users of HSLIC’s 3D Printer choose PLA filament for their models, but in this case the acetone from the production of the hydrogel would end up degrading the scaffold. As part of HSLIC’s 3D Printing services, we offer nylon filament as an option, but this was the first time since we got the 3D Printer that we had an occasion to use it. The model required support material, which we printed in water soluble PVA.
After coating the microwires on this nylon scaffold, the microwires then get sent to Dr. Abishek Prasad, of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. Dr. Prasad will then implant the electrodes into rat models to test the efficacy of the treatment. For more information about this type of brain electrode research, see this recent paper: Implantable brain–computer interface for neuroprosthetic-enabled volitional hand grasp restoration in spinal cord injury. 
HSLIC staff welcomed this opportunity to participate in a project that featured so many connections: between health sciences and chemistry, secondary education and laboratory research, Albuquerque and Miami, as well as the HSC Campus and the UNM Main Campus.
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