Capillary-Fiber Based Electrophoretic Delivery Device

Organic electronic ion pumps (OEIPs) are versatile tools for electrophoretic delivery of substances with high spatiotemporal resolution. To date, OEIPs and similar iontronic components have been fabricated using thin-film techniques and often rely on laborious, multistep photolithographic processes. OEIPs have been demonstrated in a variety of in vitro and in vivo settings for controlling biological systems, but the thin-film form factor and limited repertoire of polyelectrolyte materials and device fabrication techniques unnecessarily constrain the possibilities for miniaturization and extremely localized substance delivery, e.g., the greater range of pharmaceutical compounds, on the scale of a single cell. Here, we demonstrate an entirely new OEIP form factor based on capillary fibers that include hyperbranched polyglycerols (dPGs) as the selective electrophoretic membrane. The dPGs enable electrophoretic channels with a high concentration of fixed charges and well-controlled cross-linking and can be re...