Prof. Haluk Külah from the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department and his team have been awarded ERC support for their self-energizing cochlear implant project developed as a result of their work on bio-MEMS and energy generators.

Stating that the ERC project is basically a hearing device, Prof. Haluk Külah added that they have been working on an in-ear system that collects energy and operates the cochlear implant by converting the incoming acoustic signal to electric energy:

In the hearing process of a healthy person; an acoustic signal received from an outside source vibrates the eardrum and bones and then the vibration is transmitted to the cochlea. The hairs in the cochlea vibrate and these hairs electrochemically stimulate the nerve. The loss or inherent lack of small hairs that are found in the cochlea in the ear and enable hearing by stimulating the nerves when vibrating with sound is one of the most common types of hearing loss that appears in many different forms. The current solution to this problem is a standard cochlear implant. In this system, there is a receiver on the outside, there is also a part of it inside, which transmits the signal as RF (radio frequency) from the outside and enters into the cochlea via an electrode and makes electrical stimulation instead of hairs, but the system’s battery needs to change every day. As there is an external part, this may cause challenges in daily use; especially young people do not prefer using this system. The purpose of the ERC project is to make sure that all these procedures are performed in the ear.  

The principle of the study is based on the stimulation of the related sinusoidal voltage produced by artificial hairs made of the piezo-electrical materials by vibrating with the acoustic signal. Thanks to eight channels , each sensitive to a separate frequency, hearing happens on a wider band. There is a special part on the top of the chip to charge the battery. When the patient is not hearing or a high-tone signal is given at a frequency for the duration of the charge so that the patient cannot hear, this part vibrates and charges the battery. Prof. Külah explained how this system works as follows: 

“The person with a hearing problem will wear the headset at night and get a sound from a tone that he/she cannot hear through a mobile phone application, the battery will charge by that sound, and he/she will get up in the morning and continue to use the device.”

Prof. Külah stated that his project completely changed the working principle of the present cochlear implant systems, and they were awarded the ERC project as they demonstrated in their scientific paper that this was very challenging but still applicable, and if they succeeded, everything in Cochlear implant technology would change and a new era would start. Prof. Haluk Külah mentioned that upon the rejection of his first application to ERC, they established a spin off company at METU Technopark on their research topic and carried on the cancer research, and in their third applications, they changed the research topic from cancer diagnosing systems based on blood into in-ear hearing systems, and they included the cochlear implant into the project; so they were invited to an interview in Brussels; however, they could not be one of the projects to be subsidized although they got a good score. In their final application, they were granted the ERC support as the first winner project of the panel. Highlighting that this is frequently experienced in the European Union project submissions but it requires carrying on working diligently, Prof. Külah added that ERC is a far-reaching and competitive organization that supports applicable projects to change the technology radically. Prof. Külah said they work as a team in drafting a project and Dr. Özge Zorlu and Dr. Ebru Özgür have valuable contributions both in maturation of ideas and writing stages. Noting that ERC is a highly competitive project support, Prof. Külah continued:

"The acceptance rate is between 10% and 15%. A total of 11 people were granted the project support from Turkey until the period when we got our grant, only 2 of whom were from electronics engineering, and all of whom were from private universities. As METU, we are the first to receive a project support as a state university. So, this support is more meaningful and nice."

Telling the story of the project, Prof. Külah said Prof. Nebil Göksu from Faculty of Medicine, Gazi University, contacted them and mentioned they performed cochlear implant operations; however, this needed to be a more compact system, so they started to work together and this lasted a long time and took out the patent of the system they intended to develop. This patent has been obtained in Europe and Turkey and is in progress in Japan and the USA. Noting that Prof. Göksu who passed away in summer 2016 had wanted the name “Ata” as a brand name of the project product, “The departure of Prof. Göksu has assigned a different responsibility to our team.” said Prof. Külah.

Prof. Külah emphasized that the project purpose is to develop the device as a prototype within five years and to carry out animal testing; but in the long-term, they wanted to make efforts for the commercialization of the project through a spin-off company as it was in cancer research. Dr. Külah said that they are working as a crowded team with the advantage of ERC project, and continued: :

"We have a working group of nine people in total. We have a researcher (Dilek Işık) from Canada who works on material engineering. We also have two mechanical engineering and electronics engineering students (Aziz Koyuncuoğlu, Bedirhan İlik) who make manufacturing, and students who are working on the design of the electronical interface (Hasan Uluşan, Salar Chamanian, Ahmet Efe) and two students who are working on the ear tympanic modeling and packing (Parinaz Ashrafi, Alper Kaan Soydan). We also work with the medical doctors from Gazi University."

Other Projects

Külah explained that they were working on the DNA mutation analysis on a chip in cooperation with METU Biology Department when he first came back to Turkey from the USA. He emphasized that this study develops an electrophoresis system on the chip producing results in a cheaper and faster way instead of large-scale, time-consuming, costly, and less sensitive electrophoresis systems that already do this screening. Working on cells in his next studies, Prof.  Külah said they conduct studies on solving a very important, fundamental problem that the world is working on right now, which is cell sorting and counting in screening the possibility of metastasis in the diagnosis of the diseases such as cancer and in the routine control of a cancer patient, which means the pre-diagnosis or pre-metastasis diagnosis, with a interdisciplinary team  (biology, medicine, mechanical engineering, chemistry, electrical-electronics engineering). Prof. Külah, who expressed that they have 23 patents in total with eight main patents and the patents from different countries in this area, summarized another study as follows:

"We used our study that started with cell separation to refer to chemotherapy in the next phase. The studies we have done in the labs and the ones in the literature show us that the electrical properties of drug-resistant cancer cells are different from nondrug-resistant cancer cells. We are also able to distinguish between the drug resistant and nondrug-resistant cancer cells and try to administer personalized medicine/therapy. Thus, we aim to develop a system in which analysis can be performed using a single-use chip for each patient and to ensure that this system is used in hospitals. This is a problem that is still worked on and unresolved all over the world."

Prof. Külah pointed out to their project on developing a number of systems mainly for separation, counting, chemotherapy referral and personalized treatment applications through ERC project, although they have been working in many different fields such as developing a bacterial sensor for detecting sepsis, which is also known as intensive care disease or nosocomial infection, and developing systems performing an analysis of drug action.  Prof. Külah stated that these projects should go through processes like human experimentation after conducting R&D, taking a number of approvals and performing animal testing so that they can turn into products and commercialize; therefore, plenty of time and significant financial investments are required, and as in-vivo and in-vitro studies have different applicability times, the grants differ accordingly and concluded:

"The resources that we receive support are very different. For instance, we got support from Intel for a while.  Our aim was to produce energy as we write on the keyboard by placing an energy-generating system under the keyboard, and to see whether we can increase the energy of the laptop or the battery life a bit. We received support from the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology, the TUBITAK, the European Union, on very different projects. We also got support from IBM. There was a very serious support given to us by the Ministry of Development last year. We received an important support for the development of the MEMS center for biomedical applications, which was very critical in terms of the sustainability of our work."