Implanting one's own living tissue, with implants contained inside?
Hi just had and idea spring to mind but it relies on a concept that i'm not to familiar with. would you be able to take ones own tissue, grow it in a lab however you needed it and reimplant it with a implant tucked into said tissue? with this method of tucking or connecting an implant to the tissue grown outside the body would you be able to make external implants and join them to the flesh of someone? thanks in advance for any answer's on this.
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Stimulation is no problem.. if something like glial scar material gets thick you can simply turn up the amplitude of the signal. Now, in terms of the receiving portion of your circuit.. there's nothing that can be done really. You can filter the signal better or make your probe more sensitive or whatever but at some point.. that it. How can we get around this? Well, if we had isolated neurons grown right into an array, we could prevent the glial scar types of stuff from happening and we could locate the neurons right on top of our sensors. The thing is.. if it's some randomly selected cell line our body will reject it or worse. Worse because... immortalized cell line are essentially cancer. But no, they will be rejected. Unless.. it's our own cell.
Collecting the cells is not an issue. Neural crest type cells can be scraped right out of your nose and isolated. Pricey? Well yes. A lack of funds is essentially what's stopping me but it's not so far out that it can't be done.
In terms of getting the nervous system to "incorporate" these implanted cells? Well, there are some really interesting potential ways of doing this. We can chemically induce this to occur.