EPSRC Funding Success: Bioelectronics

EPSRC funds research on bioelectronics

Dr Nazarpour is Co-Investigator on a successful EPSRC proposal titled Symbiotic Intrabody Networks for Bioelectronic Therapeutics.

The award (£300,00) is part of the EPSRC 2050 Transformative Healthcare Technologies call (feasibility stage). The project is a collaboration between researchers at Newcastle University, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of Bath.

Project Synopsis

Across the world, societies are rapidly ageing, so a key challenge is to ensure healthy optimal lifespans for as many as possible. Drug therapies have been improving, but it can be difficult to optimally modulate or tune the body's function to the normal daily cycle. So, in recent years there has been a surge of interest in bioelectronic solutions. For example, SetPoint Medical just received FDA approval (Autumn 2020) for a vagal nerve implant to treat arthritis. Here in the UK, Galvani is hoping to achieve similar success with trials already underway.

Bioelectronics has many modes of operation - including pacemakers for heart, brain and body, sensory restoration (for the deaf and blind), and short-term healing applications such as supporting opioid withdrawal. The market is therefore very large, and expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades. In the first instance, we will target Cardiac Arrhythmias.

The aim of this project is to create a platform of wirelessly networked therapeutic implants which are powered by harvesting energy from the body's own energy supply: glucose. The use of energy harvesting will allow for much smaller implants with much easier surgical implementation, and thus much wider use. The ability of multiple implants to reliably communicate with each other will allow for new types of personalised medical therapies. In particular, it will allow for tuning of the therapeutic interventions according to sensed information from across the body.