Innovators never stop thinking about tomorrow. Meet University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign innovator Cunjiang Yu, who’s helping those with cardiovascular diseases, like arrhythmia, with his newly created self-adhesive rubbery bio-optoelectronic stimulator, or RBOES.
It’s critical for hearts to keep their rhythmic pacing. For those with cardiovascular diseases, light illumination-induced electrical stimulation has been a proven effective method for helping these ailments, but research has lacked a suitable material that has the necessary tissue-like mechanical softness and sufficient light therapies to help cardiac stimulation.
“We tried to develop a material or a device that would stick on the surface of the heart,” said Yu, founder professor at The Grainger College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “The heart’s beating is a very complex motion.”
Given the intricacies of the heart’s rhythm, researchers had to get creative in considering a material to meld to the critical organ. Flexible materials like paper or plastic simply wouldn’t due because they confine the beating of the heart, which would induce arrhythmias.
“We need to have something that can form together with the heart,” Yu said. “But you need to make sure this device does not cause a mechanical nodding to the heart confining its natural beating behaviors.”
With all those requirements in mind, Yu and his fellow researchers developed an ultra-thin, sticky rubber material, nearly 300 nanometers in thickness, known as RBOES that conforms to the heart.
Another important aspect of this device is that it can provide electrical stimulation functions by shining light on the material, which is known as optoelectronics. “It's like a solar cell,” Yu said.
As for next steps? Yu and his collaborators are trying to figure out how to deliver light into the body in order to bring the optoelectronic functions of this material to life.
Additionally, this therapeutic device currently requires open-heart surgery. Researchers are hoping to make it less invasive of a procedure in the future.
They’re also hoping to make the material biodegradable so that it could function for only a certain period of time, which would also help avoid an additional surgery.
Yu is hopeful about the prospect of using rubber materials to further advance medical treatment of cardiac diseases.
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Yu credits his team as well as his collaborators, particularly his Texas Heart Institute collaborators Abdelmotagaly Elgalad, THI’s senior research investigator of cardiovascular surgery research and co-director of the Center for Preclinical Surgical and Intervention Research; Camila Hochman-Mendez, assistant director of regenerative medicine research and director of the Biorepository and Cell Profiling Lab; and their teams. Yu lab’s postdoc fellow Zhoulyu Rao led this research effort, which was recently featured in Science Advances.
Research funding comes from the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.
Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations
In addition to his primary ECE appointment, Yu has affiliations with the departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Science and Engineering, and Bioengineering, and with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Materials Research Laboratory, and the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory.