Improving mechanical stiffness of coated benzocyclobutene (BCB) based neural implant

We briefly report recent results of a simple alternate method to improve mechanical stiffness of BCB polymer neural implant for surgical insertion into brain tissue, which uses coatings dissolvable in bio-fluids. We have studied three different coating materials such as thermo-reversible gel Poloxamer 407, glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) and regular table sugar that were applied by dip coating onto the implant surface. The preliminary results of this study have shown that coating BCB probes with Poloxamer 407 polymer, a thermo-reversible gel, or table sugar significantly improves the buckling strength. However, the table sugar coating provides the greatest increase in stiffness, which is sufficient to penetrate both the preserved and live brain tissues without buckling.