Positive Technology Journal

Via Medgadget

According to Information Society Technologies (IST), European investigators have created a novel interface between mammalian neurons and silicon chips. The development, achieved by the NACHIP project, funded by the EU Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies, is a "crucial first step in the development of advanced technologies that combine silicon circuits with a mammal's nervous system. "

From the press release:

The ultimate applications are potentially limitless. In the long term it will possibly enable the creation of very sophisticated neural prostheses to combat neurological disorders. What's more, it could allow the creation of organic computers that use living neurons as their CPU.

Those applications are potentially decades away, but in the much nearer term the new technology could enable very advanced and sophisticated drug screening systems for the pharmaceutical industry.

"Pharmaceutical companies could use the chip to test the effect of drugs on neurons, to quickly discover promising avenues of research," says Professor Stefano Vassanelli, a molecular biologist with the University of Padua in Italy, and one of the partners in the NACHIP project, funded under the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme.

NACHIP's core achievement was to develop a working interface between the living tissue of individual neurons and the inorganic compounds of silicon chips. It was a difficult task.

"We had a lot of problems to overcome," says Vassanelli. "And we attacked the problems using two major strategies, through the semiconductor technology and the biology."