While companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are hard at work on brain-computer interfaces that require surgery to cut open the skull and insert a complex array of wires into a person’s head, a team of researchers at MIT have been researching a wireless electronic brain implant that they say could provide a non-invasive alternative that makes the technology far easier to access.
They describe the system, called Circulatronics, as more of a treatment platform than a one-off brain chip. Working with researchers from Wellesley College and Harvard University, the MIT team recently released a paper on the new technology, which they describe as an autonomous bioelectronic implant.
As New Atlas points out, the Circulatronics platform starts with an injectable swarm of sub-cellular sized wireless electronic devices, or “SWEDs,” which can travel into inflamed regions of the patient’s brain after being injected into the bloodstream. They do so by fusing with living immune cells, called monocytes, forming a sort of cellular cyborg.
After they’ve been injected, the SWEDs then follow the “natural trafficking” of the immune cells to sites of inflammation in the brain, which play a significant role in many neurological diseases.
Once at the target area, the SWEDs embed in the inflamed part of the brain, where they deliver “electrical modulation” — basically tiny electrical shocks — in an effort to deliver signals that otherwise wouldn’t get through.
In their paper, the researchers claim Circulatronics could be used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, strokes, brain tumors, spinal injuries, and more. The team says they’ve successfully implanted the experimental SWEDs in a rodent brain, which they could then control wirelessly to provide electrical stimulation.
If it works out in human patients, the researchers hope Circulatronics could expand treatment of brain regions which are typically expensive, difficult, and dangerous to treat with traditional surgery. (New Atlas reports that Circulatronics will probably take another three years to even enter clinical trials.)
The cool part, the study’s lead author Deblina Sarkar explains in a video, is that “this technology is not just confined to the brain, but could also be extended to other parts of the body in the future.”
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