Greetings From Detroit

Doctoral student Gal Shpun participated in the prestigious international The Eye and The Chip 2025 conference in Detroit, held by the Henry Ford Institute. This biannual conference brings together researchers, physicians, and engineers from around the world who are engaged in brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuroprosthetic implants for restoring eyesight in various areas of the eye and the brain. This year featured attendees from Elon Musk's Neuralink, which announced the expansion of their neural implants to the realm of vision restoration. "Participating in the conference allowed for direct, unmediated discussion, idea exchange, and getting to know research partners from around the world," says Shpun.

At the conference, Shpun, 39, presented the fruits of his research: An innovative hybrid retinal implant composed of an array of three-dimensional electrodes (measuring 10 µm, the size of a single cell) integrated with living nerve cells, designed to restore vision in patients suffering from retinal degeneration in high resolution. "The implant enables precise electrical activation of nerve cells at a single-cell resolution, by trapping the electric field surrounding the neurons, which significantly reduces the cell activation threshold, thereby preventing current leakage to neighboring cells. This allows for improved resolution toward single-cell activation (instead of a large number of cells at once), opening the door to more natural vision restoration and the implementation of high-resolution vision technologies for various types of retinal blindness, improving upon existing technologies," he explains.

Growing Organs in a Dish

Shpun says that since he was a small child in elementary school, he dreamed of being a researcher. "In middle school, when images and articles about tissue engineering and regenerative medicine became popular – like that famous picture of a human ear grown on the back of a rat – something sparked inside me," he recounts. "This curiosity birthed a dream: to grow living organs in a dish. After the army, I attended a fascinating lecture by a professor from the Weizmann Institute about vision research, in which he explained how different nerve cells in the retina and brain respond to specific stimuli. I was in awe. However, I didn't know what to choose: Biology? Medicine? Engineering? From my practical inclination and desire to combine science with technology, I decided to study biomedical engineering – a field that links the engineering world with the medical world, and whose goal is to develop technological solutions to health problems."

Shpun completed his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Tel Aviv University. For his final project, in Prof. Tal Dvir's laboratory for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, he developed a hydrogel system for on-demand drug release – a system that was integrated into a hybrid-electronic heart patch, designed to release medication electrically in a controlled manner after myocardial infarction. "This was my first exposure to the idea of cyborg tissues, combining living cells with electronic systems for healing and rehabilitation," he says. He then worked in the industry at two medical startup companies: Lifebeam, which develops wearable sensors for measuring pulse in athletes; and Hospitech Respiratory, which developed a system for monitoring and filling air pressure in the endotracheal tube cuff in sedated-ventilated patients in intensive care.

Over time, Shpun realized that he was more drawn to the engineering-physical side – less trial and error, more mathematical models and equations. This is how he found himself in neural stimulation. He completed his graduate degree under the joint supervision of Prof. Ze'ev Zalevsky from the Faculty of Engineering, then head of the Electro-Optics track (later dean of the faculty, and currently the university's vice president for industry relations) and Prof. Yossi Mandel, head of Bar-Ilan's School of Optometry and Vision Science, from the Faculty of Life Sciences, with whom he also continued on his doctoral studies. They worked in Mandel's laboratory for vision science and engineering, which opened just a few months before Shpun's arrival at Bar-Ilan. "The original project was developing optical devices for light amplification on the cell membrane and improving efficiency for optical neural activation, which produced the collaboration with Ze'ev," he explains. "The project progressed to developing a hybrid ocular implant: a 'cyborg tissue' that combines living nerve cells integrated on an electronic chip for restoring vision in blind people."

Research as a Mission

Shpun and his collaborators produced major paper about the research, which Shpun presented at The Eye and The Chip 2025 conference. The paper was published last September in the prestigious Advanced Functional Materials journal, ranked as Q1 Top-10%, in the top decile of the world's scientific journals in its field, and is considered among the most prestigious and influential in terms of research quality and citations. Thanks to the prestigious platform, Shpun received an award of excellence in research from the Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA).

Shpun also presented his work during a research laboratory tour of leading researchers in the United States, which he conducted after the conference. He visited Wayne State University in Detroit, where he met with the director of the Smart Sensors and Integrated Microsystems (SSIM) program, which specializes in micro-systems, biological sensors, and advanced medical instrumentation; the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), at the Bionic Vision Lab, which develops computational models for computerized vision; the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, at a laboratory for developing medical instrumentation, headed by a pioneer in the field of neuro-electronic implants and a developer of the cochlear implant for hearing restoration; and at Stanford University's laboratory for physics of living systems, which focuses on optical and electronic technologies for vision restoration and neural stimulation. "The visits were an important opportunity to create academic connections, to become familiar with some of the most advanced laboratories in the world, and to examine possibilities for future collaborations or for a postdoctoral track, upon completion of the doctorate and publication of my last paper," says Shpun.

He considers his work a mission, and for a personal reason. "My grandmother, who passed away last summer, was blind due to glaucoma," he shares. "Although my research is not aimed at this disease specifically, the knowledge of her suffering and the struggles that many elderly people experience in losing their vision made my research very personal. In fact, what began as childhood curiosity and a desire to 'grow organs in a dish' has become over the years a mission: to restore people's ability to see."