Neural Matrix CCD

What it is. The Neural Matrix CCD was an early-stage biosensor that grew neurons directly on a charge-coupled-device array, so the electrical activity of a living neuronal network could be read out per-pixel by the chip beneath it. The project was developed at Cellular Bioengineering, Inc. (CBI), a Skai Ventures portfolio company in Hawaii, in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It won an R&D 100 Award in 2005. The CBI team publicly credited on the award is Amy Weintraub, Kevin T.C. Jim, Kevin Chinn, Leslie Isaki, Geming Lui, and me (then under my pre-2023 name, Ryan Littrell).

The problem behind it. Conventional multi-electrode arrays for neural recording had a fixed grid of contacts and a fixed signal-to-noise floor. Putting living neurons directly onto a CCD imager promised something different: spatially continuous read-out of network activity over a chip-sized field, without sacrificing single-cell resolution. The device-side engineering work (the CCD itself, the array surface chemistry, the read-out electronics) was the LBNL and CBI engineering teams’ lift. For CBI on the biology side, the hard part was keeping neurons viable on the prepared surface long enough to record from.

What I did. Concept research and prototyping on the early-stage neuron biosensor. The work I owned on the project was the feasibility side: technical (could the cells live and signal on the array surface long enough to record), economic (was the device path realistic to scale), and cultural (would a chip-of-neurons biosensor land with the audiences likely to encounter it). The CCD-side device engineering belonged to the named co-recipients.