Episode description

Vailiki Giagka is an Assistant Professor at TU Delft and Research Group Leader at Fraunhofer IZM in Berlin where she conducts research on the design and fabrication of active neural interfaces.

***This podcast is sponsored by Ripple Neuro, check out their Neuroscience Research Tools here***

Top 3 Takeaways:

• "Water vapor is not dangerous for neural devices, it will not cause your metals to corrode, as long as it remains in the form of vapor. The moment it condenses into liquid water and you have ions in there, is when corrosion can start, and that is the beginning of the end"
• Conformal polymer coatings have been implanted in bodies for decades but we lack means to prove upfront the amount of time a certain coated device would last in the body
• "Our aim is not to create startup ourselves, but it is really to help this ecosystem by supporting companies working on this"

0:30 "How do you work in Berlin and the Hague in the Netherlands at the same time?

2:30 "Why especially neural device packaging?"

5:15 "What's the size of your guys' device or packing?"

7:15 "Do you want to, do you wanna describe the neural implant network mesh a little bit more and how does it work and why is it necessary?" 

9:15 Sponsorship by Ripple Neuro

9:45 "So let's talk about maybe conformal coatings. What is it, how does it work? Why is it necessary?"

19:00 "So what are some rough numbers, is one method better than the other, and then how many years of simulated life can one survive versus the other?"

21:45 "So how do we test it? How do we do the accelerated testing to be able to simulate a human lifespan?"

25:00 "So now you also work on the wireless power delivery, wireless transmission. How is this, how does this work? Why is this important?"

31:00 "Neurons fire with electrical signals and you're using ultrasound. So how does that work? Why is it able to work?"

32:00 "How does the power usage compare with electrical or ultrasound cuffs?"

33:30 "Let's talk about your graphene work."

37:30 "These three areas that you're working on, these all seem like very good candidates for, a spinoff company or some kind of, patents. Have you thought about this?"

42:00 "If you had unlimited funding, what would you do?"

43:45 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"