| $3 million grant to fund UCSC research on implants that mimic biological functions |
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2 October 2003, for the Santa Cruz Sentinel Nearly $3 million will fund researchers at UC Santa Cruz working on microchips that can be implanted in the body to overcome blindness, paralysis and stroke injuries by mimicking biological functions. A grant from the National Science Foundation provides $17 million over five years for the Center of Biomemetic MicroElectronic Systems, based at the University of Southern California, and will support collaborating engineers at USC, UCSC and the California Institute of Technology. UCSC’s share of the grant, announced Wednesday, is $2.7 million. The goal of the project is to make prosthetics for "doing artificially what the body is no longer able to do," said Michael Isaacson, professor of optoelectronics at UCSC. The research includes prostheses for restoring cognitive functions to stroke victims, movement to paralyzed limbs and vision to those left blind by diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration. All of these implanted microelectronic devices need to be able to interface properly with the nervous system. Isaacson works on these connections, dealing with "how you control the body’s response to putting something into it." Wentai Liu, professor of electrical engineering and director of the center’s activities at UCSC, leads the work on retinal implants. The UCSC research is through UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering, established in 1997. UCSC will receive about $500,000 the first year, and increasingly more as the project develops, strengthening ties with researchers in the life sciences and with physicians, and recruiting more students to work on biomedical engineering. "What we want to do in a program like this, with engineers, biologists and clinicians," said Isaacson, is "to recruit students who aren’t afraid to cross these boundaries." This center is unique as it is "the only one in which we’ve brought together physicians with engineers," said Isaacson, and the only center "whose aim is to take these devices to their practical end — to get clinical approval." |