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Materials for bioelectronics

Organic electronics meets biology

Nature Materials volume 13, pages 775–776 (2014)Cite this article

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The structural similarity of organic semiconductors to biological compounds suggests the use of these materials in biomedical applications, yet their implementation is not straightforward. Research in this area is growing fast, thanks to the combined efforts of the multidisciplinary bioelectronics community.

Frontier research in brain/machine interfaces, nanomedicine and robotics points towards a deep interaction of technology with nature, yet the building blocks of biology are quite different from those used in electronic devices. As a consequence, the success of these fields depends on the ability to interface an artificial device with a living system. During the symposium 'Bioelectronics—materials, processes and applications' at the 2014 Materials Research Society spring meeting in San Francisco, biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers discussed this multifaceted problem, and shared the latest strategies to realize efficient communication between biological and electrical signals, using materials and devices that are fully biocompatible and conformable.

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Figure 1: Conjugated polymer chains interpenetrating a neuronal network, establishing a functional connection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guglielmo Lanzani is at the Center for Nano Science and Technology@PoliMi, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, via Giovanni Pascoli, 70/3, 20133 Milano, Italy,

    Guglielmo Lanzani

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  1. Guglielmo Lanzani
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Correspondence to Guglielmo Lanzani.

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Lanzani, G. Organic electronics meets biology. Nature Mater 13, 775–776 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4021

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