Imec’s Massachusetts center
Microelectronics can revolutionize healthcare. From its Massachusetts center of excellence, imec joins forces with its US partners to make this happen.
One of the biggest contributions semiconductor technology can make to human progress is the transformation towards personalized and affordable healthcare. This is why imec has been steadily expanding its health and life sciences activities over the past two decades.
By leveraging our infrastructure, expertise, and academic and industrial partnerships, we develop the technologies that can directly interact with biology. Bringing these technologies to the market is the most unambiguous way to fulfill our mission of ‘embracing a better life.’
Setting up a center of excellence in the world’s leading region for biotechnology will accelerate these efforts.
- Our local team, with an office in Cambridge, directly supports our US partners in gaining access to imec’s health technology portfolio.
- Through long-term partnerships with US universities and research centers, we amplify innovation in the domain of semiconductor technology for health.
Collaboration with MIT
One of the first projects at imec’s Massachusetts center is a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The work will be conducted within a number of groups at MIT including the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE), Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).
This collaboration targets the development of the building blocks for groundbreaking diagnostic devices. Enabled by advanced semiconductor technology, these devices will be able to clinically monitor vital signs and biomarkers in a minimally invasive way.
Such close and precise monitoring, combined with AI, is an essential step towards the individual digital biological profiles (digital twins) that support truly personalized medicine.
With this collaboration, imec and MIT pool their resources towards a common goal of revolutionizing healthcare through microelectronics:
- world-class talent of pioneering clinicians and researchers from the life sciences and semiconductor ecosystems
- unique infrastructure that includes imec’s semiconductor fab
- IP and knowhow across various disciplines related to microelectronics for healthcare, such as semiconductor technology, biochemistry, and material science
- a wide network of academic and industrial partners
The goal is to provide full-stack solutions, from materials to clinical validation and manufacturability that are ready to be taken up by partners from MedTech and pharma, particularly in the United States. By contributing to the development of a specialized workforce, we can ensure that these innovations are continued within the industry.
The first projects are:
Non-invasive hemoglobin quantification with photoacoustics
Accurate hemoglobin and hemodynamic measurements are critical for managing GI bleeding, anemia, and transfusion decisions. However, current practices depend on centralized blood analysis, limiting the frequency of assessments, increasing costs, and placing significant strain on clinical resources. Photoacoustic imaging offers an alternative that is non-invasive, accurate and suitable for use at the point of care.
MIT and imec will co-develop a photoacoustic system using commercially and research-available components, collecting data from healthy volunteers. These studies will inform the technical and clinical feasibility of a next-generation system, combining imec’s Optomechanical Ultrasound Sensor (OMUS) technology with MIT’s reconstruction algorithms, models, and systems.
Imec’s optomechanical ultrasound sensor
Multivalent bottlebrush polymers for single molecule sensing of proteins with solid-state nanopores
The next frontier in precision health lies in proteomics, where the dynamic complexity of proteins and their post-translational modifications demands single-molecule sensitivity. This project proposes a scalable synthetic polymer–nanopore-based platform for protein detection and differentiation, enabled by the chemical conjugation of proteins to multivalent bottlebrush polymers (MBPs).
By combining MBPs, synthesized by the Johnson group at MIT, with imec’s CMOS-compatible solid-state nanopores using EUV lithography, the goal is to create and benchmark MBP–protein conjugates in a high-throughput reader system.
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