The short version
- MIT engineers built a flexible brain implant that pairs a drug-delivery tube with an array of 24 miniature ultrasound transducers.
- With the ultrasound on, an MRI contrast agent spread farther through mouse brain tissue than it did by diffusion alone.
- No therapeutic drug has been tested yet, and the published release gives no distances or animal counts.
Canan Dagdeviren’s group at the MIT Media Lab has built LUCID, short for Long-term Ultrasound-enhanced Convective Injection Device: a flexible implant “as thin as a sheet of cardstock.” A 3D-printed cannula sits on an array of 24 miniature ultrasound transducers that make sound at the needle tip. A passive osmotic pump feeds it from a reservoir of about 100 microliters, and the ultrasound is switched by Bluetooth from a wirelessly recharged battery. In a gel that mimics tissue, and then in mice given an MRI contrast agent, the substance spread farther with the ultrasound on than off. The work, led by Sarah Ornellas and Jason Hou, appeared on October 26 in Device.
The target is glioblastoma, with a little over 10,000 US cases a year and an average survival of 12 to 15 months after diagnosis. Implants that release drugs into the brain mostly rely on slow diffusion. “Getting a drug into the brain is only part of the challenge,” Hou said. The sound sets up convective flow that carries molecules farther. MIT’s release gives no distances, ratios or animal counts, and no cancer drug has been tried. In people, the cannula and array would sit inside the skull, with the battery and electronics outside.
This is a bench-and-mouse result, years from a patient.
