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Implantable Highly Compliant Devices for Heating of Internal Organs

Makarov, D.

Recent advances in the field of flexible electronics have opened the door for this technology to deeply impact the health care sector. The development of sensors and actuators which are lightweight and mechanically compliant enables them to be used for continuous health monitoring, on-site therapies or soft chirurgical ads. The key feature of these novel gadgets is their ability to provide targeted treatment and diagnosis without constraining the natural motion of the body or its internal organs.
Though many of these flexible diagnostic or therapeutic devices have been successfully demonstrated already, cancer treatment remains relatively unexplored in this field. In particular, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC, liver cancer) is one of the leading causes of cancer related mortalities worldwide with a constantly growing incidence. Numerous efforts have been devoted to the development of targeted cancer treatments which selectively destroy cancer cells and spare the healthy tissue.
We propose and develop an implantable, multifunctional and highly compliant device for targeted thermal treatment of cancerous tissues [1]. The device is fabricated on a 6-µm-thick polymeric foil, which seamlessly conforms to the soft liver tissue and allows for precisely controlled joule heating without on-site rigid parts. Its high mechanical compliance provides stable readings even upon severe mechanical deformations, enabling temperature accuracies of 0.1°C at bending radii of 2.5 mm, characteristic for mouse liver tissues. This heating device can treat tissue over the whole range of temperatures leading to fever, hyperthermia and ablation, while using a driving current as low as 10 mA. We demonstrate the electro-thermal and mechanical characterization of the devices and study various heat impact scenarios on normal and cancerous tissue using autochthonous murine HCC models.
Due to their high mechanical compliance, stability and thermal treatment versatility, the here developed devices can become a complement or alternative solution to radio frequency ablation (RFA) techniques for cancer treatment.

[1] G. S. Cãnón Bermudez, A. Kruv, T. Voitsekhivska, I. Hochnadel, A. Lebanov, A. Potthoff, J. Fassbender, T. Yevsa, and D. Makarov, “Implantable Highly Compliant Devices for Heating of Internal Organs: Toward Cancer Treatment”. Adv. Eng. Mater. 21, 1900407 (2019).

Keywords: flexible electronics; cancer treatment

  • Invited lecture (Conferences) (Online presentation)
    International Conference on Advances in Biological Science and Technology (ICABST2020), 28.10.2020, Sanya, China

Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-32011
Publ.-Id: 32011