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Brian Jamieson asks Kari Hoffman, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, Adrien Peyrache, Ph.D., McGill University, and Eran Stark, MD, Ph.D., Tel Aviv University what’s on their ePhys wishlists and where they would look if they had the right kinds of tools.

Diagnostic Biochips founder and CTO Brian Jamieson talks with experts from the neuroscience community in the new series, Probing Questions. Tune in for our conversations about their work and the future of neurotechnology.

Multi-channel extracellular neuronal recording provides a window into the synaptic inputs and action potential outputs of multi-neuronal (N= 10’s, 100’s and recently 1000’s of neurons) circuits in a variety of cortical and deep brain structures. These measurements can be carried out on a chronic basis in awake and behaving rodents and primates. The use of micron-scale, lithographically-defined semiconductor electrode “probes” (smaller than a human hair) allows a large number of precisely-controlled electrodes to target neurons throughout an entire region of tissue with a minimum of tissue...

An introduction to neural probes for the non-expert…

Looking through a microscope at a network of neurons in the brain (as in the fluorescent microphotograph at left), it’s striking how much of the volume is taken up by axons and dendrites, the input and output projections to the cell bodies that function essentially like electrical wiring. This wiring is heavily cross-connected, with multiple axons terminating on each single downstream cell body, and each cell body sending projections to many other neurons. 

In many fields there is an inherent trade-off between the benefits of product uniformity and the appeal of customization.

Product uniformity fosters reproducibility, reliability, and lower cost, whereas customization gives users access to unique features ideally suited to the specific task at hand. Henry Ford’s comment that a customer can have “any color so long as it is black” may seem tone deaf to modern ears, yet Ford’s approach to standardizing and scaling automobile manufacturing led to the widespread adoption of the car.

Just over a year ago, the DBC team set out to better understand the neural probe market.  We spoke to as many neuroscience researchers as we could– from current probe users to those who had never heard of them– to see how we could build a better probe.  The things that we heard over and over were that users want:

Two Diagnostic Biochips team members, Brian G. Jamieson PhD and Karen Scida PhD, recently had a review paper published in Translational Research: The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine, along with UCSB’s Kevin W. Plaxco PhD.

Patent Issued for ‘In Vivo Biosensor’

DBC Featured in Journal of Materials Chemistry

Patent for Integrated Optical Neural Probes