Medical Microsystems and Enabling Technologies for Precision Medicine

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Advances in micro/nanotechnology are rapidly evolving medical device technologies. This trend is facilitating the advent of precision medicine, an approach to personalized healthcare tailored to genetic and other characteristics of individual patients. Microsystems with embedded sensors and actuators, or micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), offer a promising path to this emerging field, with their unique ability for accurate assessment and targeted treatment of local lesions through minimally invasive forms. When placed inside the body, MEMS, essentially planar silicon chips with delicate on-chip structures, however suffer a variety of issues in critical aspects including mechanical robustness, effective interaction with three-dimensional tissue and nerves, remote powering and control, and biocompatibility. Breakthrough approaches are needed to tackle these challenges effectively. This research is aimed to exert the full potential of MEMS for their clinical applications in intelligent implants and surgical devices that will push the advancement of precision medicine. To this end, we will seek novel routes to constructing transducers and packaged systems in highly miniaturized, implantable, and robust forms via leverage of nontraditional functional materials together with micro/nano-scale fabrication technology. A focus will be placed on stimuli-responsive materials to enable autonomous "smart" actuation and sensing in the micro and nano domains. This route, if successful, leads to a kill-three-birds-with-one-stone solution, achieving active/perceptive functions with the responsive feature, ultimate downsizing with their extremely simple design architectures, and high robustness/reliability led by the same design nature, all at once to bring medical MEMS into reality. One of the short-term objectives of this research is to study and demonstrate novel micro/nano transducers functionalized by stimuli-responsive and nano-scale materials for their in-vivo and wireless operations. We will then assess and verify the practicality of these transducers by applying them to the development of revolutionary microsystems including drug-delivery implants and smart catheters that will advance precision therapy and diagnosis of localized disease such as cardiovascular disease and cancers. Alternative micro/nanofabrication processes that will serve as a key enabling technology for these devices will also be investigated in this research. In the longer term, we expect our research to offer groundbreaking technologies and products of medical microsystems that will enable more effective healthcare in Canada and worldwide, and thereby shape the future of minimally invasive precision medicine. We also envision that the new findings and developments from this research will pioneer new applications in other areas beyond the particular scope in medical areas, broadly contributing to further advances in microsystems, nanotechnology, and applied physics.