6 min reading time

I’ve been seeing the word graphene show up again and again as a wonder material for medical devices.

I found http://bit.ly/12-graphene-uses online and it happened to be written by my friends at StarFish Medical in Vancouver, Canada.

For today’s discussion, can a “graphene expert” weigh in on why our colleagues should be taking a serious look at this biomaterial?

For those among you who are starting to use graphene, would you share your discoveries and successes?

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DOWNLOAD READY FOR YOU
We have the video replay, slides, and transcript available ready at http://www.medgroup.biz/EPR-compliance-fees

It’s the quickest way to learn about your packaging, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), and battery recycling responsibilities.

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BIG GAME THIS SUNDAY
Who will win the Super Bowl? More importantly, which Medical Devices Group member will win free admission to the 10x Medical Device Conference? Good luck at http://medgroup.biz/superbowl.

No bets on Game Day!

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DISCUSSIONS
What a response to “200,000 dead!” (but have you taken the pledge?)

Theranos in a deeper hole

RFID questions

Batteries as an accessory = medical device

Device regs for West Africa

Defining cleanroom requirements

J&J to cut 3,000 Medical Device Jobs

Does widening tolerance require design validation?

UDI, Not just a requirement, but an opportunity!

3D scans: Measure and record hi-res body parts?
http://bit.ly/3D-body-parts

Rohs Directive (2011/65/EU) – Medical Devices

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Make it a great week.

Joe Hage
Medical Devices Group Leader

P.S. See “How we’re managing the Medical Devices Group now” at http://bit.ly/oh-LinkedIn

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James Guthrie
Research and Development at Obligatoinc
Dr. Jack C Bokros blazed the trail in 1969 with it’s more famous cousin PyC or pyrolytic carbon. Is is not just used for Mechanical heart valves any more either.

Claudia Orrell
Director of Digital & Marketing, MedTech Engine
We’ve just published this article about the wonderstuff and it’s potential applications… https://medtechengine.com/article/graphene-revolutionise-medtech/

Frederic ROEHRIG
Clinical Adviser
Amazing future’s next!
Thanks to our Nobel Prices helped by Mother Nature !!

Sudhin Thampi
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Posdoctoral fellow working on design and fabrication of advanced biosorbable implants.
Feels great to be a part of this discussion. Graphene and related materials have a great untapped potential for bio-medical engineering. For last 3.5 years I’ve been working on this wonderful material for application in polymer composites for bio-medical application as a part of my PhD thesis. I started with improving physical properties especially mechanical properties by working on its interaction with polymer and improving its inter-phase. But later on I was interested in exploring its interaction with biological entities and results were quite good discoveries for me . Graphene based materials were able to change the polymer surface properties on how it earlier interacted with mammalian cell lines or different classes of bacteria or blood platelets.
I believe researchers have yet lot more to discover and a more intense work will add value to existing medical technologies. Commercialization will just follow it.

Brett Goldsmith
CTO at CARDEA
Some good discussion points here. I’ve been working with graphene and other carbon nanomaterial biosensors for about 14 years. A few years ago, frustrated with the lack of commercial progress, I founded Nanomedical Diagnostics with Ross Bundy. We are now selling development kits (RUO) with clinical trials coming soon.

Graphene is a new type of material, and matching your quality to your application is key. Much harder is understanding how to integrate graphene into existing fabrication techniques. Making a graphene based system outside of an academic style artisanal workshop was hard. Can we get this through ISO 13485 and the FDA? That’s our current challenge.

So, why graphene? It’s a great electronic material for biointegration. You can make a very sensitive, label free assay, without any optics. We (nanotechnologists) have been promising that for 20 years now, but I think this is the first time we can actually mass produce the entire system.

John Joyce
CEO at International Heart, Inc. CEO at Super Shore, Inc.
Gizmag been covering graphene for two years.

James M. DePuydt
Engineering Director
Some of the comments here suggest the commercial use of graphene is a long way out. While many discussions focus on very high quality graphene, there are viable applications for lower quality materials. Some near-term applications I have seen are thermal spreading, EMI shielding and structural reinforcement.

Amer Ali
Is investigating commercial applications for graphene.
Graphene is a promising material for the usage in medical devices of several reasons already mentioned in the comments section above. One needs to understand though that graphene could reasonably be considered as a class of materials rather than a material at the moment since different production methods limits/enables different applications.

At Graphensic we are currently developing the principle of using our material as a transducer in an electrochemical-based biosensor. The challenges we face are just as James Mulling above describe mainly related to the art of handling a nanomaterial. The material we work with is graphene on silicon carbide and we consider this to be appropriate for the application primarily because the material is inert and therefore resistant to for example liquids. Also the material is produced on substrates that are suitable to process in a production line for semiconductor devices. The material is extremely sensitive to changes in its environment and if you for example manage to get it selective for a molecule you can easily with an electric readout detect very low concentrations. We have experience in detecting gas molecules down to ppb concentrations using a simple resistance measurement. In that case we had prepared the graphene for benzene detection using sputtered metal oxide nano particles.

There are several other applications for graphene within medical devices and a recommendation for the interested would be to first select the desired application and then choosing the appropriate material for it.

Pradnya Parulekar
Global Business Development- medical molding RAUMEDIC INC
Glad to see graphene becoming more mainstream.

James Mulling
Front & Back End Web Developer ► Delivering Quality Results, Constantly Expanding Skills
As a materials engineer, I’ll offer some comments on the as-yet unrealized promise of graphene. Recall that the diamond cubic lattice involves SP3 bonding, while graphite involves SP2 bonding, in which a carbon atoms bond with three neighbors in a flat arrangement that leaves spare orbitals above and below the plane of the SP2-bonded carbon. These spare orbitals form “pi bonds” and create the weakly bonded layers that make graphite a soft material that shears easily. In a sense, buckminsterfullerene, nanotubes and graphene are just disembodied single layers of graphite. Their exposed electron-cloud layers are the source of their potentially amazing heat and electronic conduction. They form a promising class of 2D materials. The trick with 2D materials will be to support them and form junctions with them in devices in ways that do not impede their atomic-scale properties. As with all-things-nano, fabrication and integration with other materials hold many difficult challenges.

Nigel Syrotuck
Mechanical Engineering Team Lead at StarFish Medical
I would be curious to discuss what we think the first entry of graphene in medical devices would be. Will batteries be the first implementation? Perhaps structural members or sensors? To my knowledge there aren’t any imminent arrivals, just best guesses, but maybe there’s a front runner?

Alan Edwards
Non Executive Director at Stent Tek Ltd
Esp technology www.esptechnology.co.uk is very active in graphene. Our technical lead will post tomorrow, Alan.

Joseph Prinable
Data scientist / Research Engineer
Graphene has useful properties when related to physical phantoms. Recently it has been shown that the conductivity and permittivity values of a phantom can be matched to cortical bone at certain fixed frequencies. This may be useful to test medical imaging hardware prior to clinical tests.

Stephen Griffin
Founder and CTO of InnovaQuartz and Cyclone Biosciences
Is graphene a viable biomaterial? Probably not at the quality and dimensions that are available today. As a materials scientist, graphene is intriguing but the properties of interest disappear rapidly with lower quality sheets from high volume production. Until low cost and high quality are married with larger dimensions, graphene will remain a curiosity confined to the laboratory, like the “high temperature” Perovskite superconductors I worked on in the late ’80s.

Brendan Lloyd
Biomedical Engineer at Kardium Inc.
I believe StarFish is in Victoria.

Bogdan Baudis
Prinicipal Software Engineer at Cambridge Consultants
If history could be of guidance here … I would say that there should be similar period as it was from semiconductor invention to the point when mass production of the integrated silicon devices began. Only at this point the silicon electronics were characterized enough to be seriously used outside of laboratories and highly expensive endeavors of aerospace (usually funded from the military or associated funds). Maybe be there is some acceleration factor … (but personally I think the so called “progress acceleration” is frequently overstated..).

Timothy Neja
Principal Consultant at Veritas Bioresources LLC
Coursera is offering a free course that starts this week that gives a good overview of graphene, and the final week’s lecture will be on graphene in biomedical devices. I have no experience working with graphene to date. https://www.coursera.org/course/graphene

Martin Berka
IoT systems: putting it all together
I think anyone who has heard of its strength-to-weight, conductivity, and the fact that it is a biomaterial can imagine applications. I would prefer discussion of the economics. Certainly, researchers can and do achieve all sorts of outcomes with graphene – but when is it economical? Can we put it in a device without raising the costs disproportionately to performance? Are there prospects to produce enough to make disposables feasible? Could anyone share their experience with medical graphene commercialization?