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The decade-long quest to hack the body’s immune system with electricity | MIT Technology Review

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“Electroceuticals” promised the post-pharma future for medicine. But the exclusive focus on the nervous system is seeming less and less warranted. In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor’s office. Research into how the nervous system controls the immune response was gaining traction. And that had opened the door to the possibility of hacking into the body’s circuitry and thereby controlling a host of chronic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and diabetes, as if the immune system were as reprogrammable as a computer. To do that you’d need a new class of implant: an “electroceutical,” formally introduced in an article in Nature in 2013. “What we are doing is developing devices to replace drugs,” coauthor and neurosurgeon Kevin Tracey told Wired UK. These would become a “mainstay of medical treatment.” No more messy side effects. And no more guessing whether a drug would work differently for you and someone else. There was money

The decade-long quest to hack the body’s immune system with electricity | MIT Technology Review Skip to Content In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor’s office. Research into how the nervous system controls the immune response was gaining traction. And that had opened the door to the possibility of hacking into the body’s circuitry and thereby controlling a host of chronic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and diabetes, as if the immune system were as reprogrammable as a computer. To do that you’d need a new class of implant: an “ele

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