There are clinical treatments for neurodegenerative diseases that involve implanting electrodes into the brain, such as deep-brain stimulation to ease the tremor and muscle tension of Parkinson’s disease. Treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder can also be soothed by electrodes that deliver controlled electric stimulation to targeted brain regions. But these applications use rigid electronics that are larger than the neural cells they’re targeting. And sometimes the brain flags these devices as foreign and launches an inflammatory response, creating scar tissue that isolates the implant, causing it to fail.
Xiao Yang is trying to solve these problems. In her lab at Johns Hopkins University, she and her colleagues strive to shrink brain-machine interfaces to the scale of neurons and make them softer and more flexible. She led the development of miniature electronics less than a micron wide that mimic the structure and mechanical properties of neurons. The hope is that these bioelectronics can use electrical signals to help brain organoids grow new neurons. “My ultimate goal is to bring the brain and machine together to a fully immersive and fully interactive hybrid system,” she says.
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Yang grew up in northeastern China, surrounded by science. Her mother, a chemist, would bring Yang to her lab when she was a child, and there Yang would play with the spare eyewash bottles and listen to researchers celebrating experiments. Now she works at the intersection of biology, chemistry, materials science and electrical engineering.
Yang set up her lab at Johns Hopkins just a year ago, and she is optimistic about the future for her field. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health both recently urged scientists to use organoids rather than animal models where possible in the hope that treatments tested in them will better translate to humans.
This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.
