They worked. "The exact numbers depend on the configuration, but as an example, we can power a 5 milliWatt device for up to 18 hours using 600 milligrams of active melanin material as a cathode," noted CMU post-doctoral researcher Hang-Ah Park.

While melanin batteries don't compare in power to lithium ones, they have enough juice to drive a drug-delivery apparatus or a sensor – such as a device capable of measuring gut microbiome states and pumping out medicine in response.


"The beauty is that by definition an ingestible, degradable device is in the body for no longer than 20 hours or so," Bettinger noted. "Even if you have marginal performance, which we do, that's all you need."

Bettinger first made a splash in the biodegradable battery arena back in 2013, when he and his team developed an earlier prototype sodium-ion battery using melanin from cuttlefish ink for the anode and manganese oxide as the cathode, according to MIT Technology Review.

The team is also working on batteries driven by non-melanin materials like pectin.

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