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The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity
“Electroceuticals” promised the post-pharma future for medicine. But the exclusive focus on the nervous system is seeming less and less warranted.
Where deep brain stimulation and other invasive implants had been limited to rare, obscure, and catastrophic problems, this new interface with the body promised many more customers: the chronic diseases now on the table are much more prevalent, including not only rheumatoid arthritis but diabetes, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, lupus, and many other autoimmune disorders. “When we’ve come upon wounds that are intractable, resistant, and will not heal, and we apply an electric field, only 50% or so of the cases actually show any effect,” says Anthony Guiseppi-Elie, a senior fellow with the American International Institute for Medical Sciences, Engineering, and Innovation. The designer kidney cells were created with a synthetic promoter—an engineered sequence of DNA that can drive expression of a target gene—that reacted to those faint inducedROSs by activating a cascade of genetic changes that opened a tap for insulin production on demand.
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