| Summary: | Neurological disorders have a significant impact on millions of people worldwide, leading to personal hardship and high healthcare costs. Our ability to improve these conditions hinges on our understanding of the nervous system and how it is affected. To improve our knowledge, new tools are required to study the brain and improve how we modulate neural activity. Current methods carry significant drawbacks such as the requirements for highly invasive surgeries, only shallow penetration depth, and low spatial resolution. Methods using magnetic fields have the potential to overcome these challenges since magnetic fields have the distinct advantage of passing through the body without attenuation. They can be employed as signal carrier to deliver stimuli anywhere in the body where magnetosensitivity is introduced. By employing electrochemistry, materials science, molecular biology, and electrical engineering this thesis aims to explore new means to utilize magnetic fields for neurostimulation and improve upon existing methods. The first project is focused on the investigation of the magnetic field effect. The effect has been studied in magnetopharmacology and is hypothesized to be at the core of how animal species perceive the earth’s magnetic field. We explore if its underlying radical pair mechanism could be used for magnetic neurostimulation. The second project employs magnetic nanotransducers for neurostimulation. These functionalized, biocompatible magnetic nanoparticles translate magnetic fields to heat or mechanical stimuli that target specific receptors to thus modulate cellular activity. We initially focus on magnetothermal neurostimulation and describe how improvements to the electronics and power delivery of the high-power, high-frequency setup have led to reliable field conditions used to investigate magnetothermally induced nerve growth. Then we shift focus to introduce a novel way to genetically target cells for mechanical neurostimulation and show how it can be used to activate cells in vitro.
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