Medical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series, Professor Polina Anikeeva
Bidirectional communication between the brain and the body is essential for maintaining homeostasis, and it is increasingly recognized that sensory signals from the peripheral organs contribute to cognitive process such reward, motivation, and affect. Disruption in brain-body signaling is a hallmark of metabolic and ingestive disorders and it is observed in neurological and psychiatric conditions ranging from Parkinson's disease to anxiety disorders and autism. Although numerous technologies have been developed to study brain dynamics, the tools to probe peripheral neural circuits remain sparse. In this talk, I will describe bioelectronic devices designed to probe physiological signaling in the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Using multi-material, multiscale fabrication techniques ranging from traditional machining and lithography to fiber drawing and nanoscale transfer patterning, our group engineers multifunctional devices capable of stimulating and recording cell signaling across all GI regions. Using these multifunctional tools we reveal the contributions of gut-brain circuits not only to ingestive and metabolic functions but also to high-level behaviors previously attributed exclusively to brain signaling. To neural circuit dynamics with cellular and molecular precision, we synthesize magnetic nanotransducers that convert externally applied magnetic fields into thermal, chemical, mechanical, and electrical signals. Since biological tissues exhibit negligible magnetic permeability and low conductivity, magnetic fields can penetrate deep into the body with no attenuation allowing us to apply the nanomagnetic transducers to remotely modulate ion channel function in arbitrarily deep tissues. We employ magnetic neuromodulation to control reward, motivation, and motor circuits, and demonstrate unique capabilities of magnetic nanomaterials to studies of gut-brain pathways with cell-type specificity.
Biography: Polina Anikeeva received her BS in Physics from St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT. She completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford, where she created devices for optical stimulation and recording from brain circuits. She joined MIT faculty in 2011 and is currently Matoula S. Salapatas Professor and the Department Head of Materials Science and Engineering. She is also a Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and serves as the Director of the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center and as an Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. She is an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Anikeeva's Bioelectronics group develops minimally invasive and biologically inspired approaches to record and modulate physiology of the central and peripheral nervous system. Anikeeva is a co-founder of NeuroBionics Inc., a company aiming to enable scalable and minimally invasive neuromodulation therapies. Anikeeva is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, the TR35, Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, and the NIH Director's Pioneer Award.
https://bioelectronics.mit.edu
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