Photogenerated Electrical Fields for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

The application of electrical engineering principles to biology represents the main issue of bioelectronics, focusing on interfacing of electronics with biological systems. In particular, it includes many applications that take advantage of the peculiar optoelectronic and mechanical properties of organic or inorganic semiconductors, from sensing of biomolecules to functional substrates for cellular growth. Among these, technologies for interacting with bioelectrical signals in living systems exploiting the electrical field of biomedical devices have attracted considerable attention. In this review, we present an overview of principal applications of phototransduction for the stimulation of electrogenic and non-electrogenic cells focusing on photovoltaic-based platforms.

Keywords: bioelectronics; biointerfaces; electrical stimulation; photovoltaics; tissue engineering.

Figure 1

(A) Schematic of experimental setup for transient photocurrent generation through a fullerene film. Reprinted with permission from Abdullaeva et al. (2016). (B) Layout of the photocapacitor, molecular structures of the pigment semiconductors and energy band illustration of a metal–p–n device. Reprinted with permission from Rand et al. (2018). (C) 3D photovoltaic wide-field retinal prosthetics realized on a PDMS support (POLYRETINA) Reprinted with permission from Ferlauto et al. (2018). (D) Pillar-based subretinal implant. Reprinted with permission from Flores et al. (2018).

Figure 2

(A) Schematic representation of a of solar cell device for in vivo experiment. Reprinted with permission from Jeong et al. (2017). (B) Fabrication flow and application of photoelectrical poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) nanoweb substrates for neuronal differentiation Reprinted with permission from Yang et al. (2017). (C) Schematic illustration of photocurrent stimulation for regenerative medicine. Reprinted with permission from Jin et al. (2011). (D) Signal pathway involved in light stimulation inducing cell proliferation. Reprinted with permission from Jin et al. (2013).