Wow ... A micro transmitter talking to your nervous system is a rapidly emerging reality. It will be commonplace within most of our lifetimes. What next? Housed in a pod shaped like a hot-dog bun and the size of a multivitamin, the entire microregulator is entirely self-contained — onboard battery, microprocessor and electrodes are integrated into a single unit. It can be wirelessly recharged, and adjusted and updated with an iPad app. The surgery to clamp it onto the vagus nerve will take about 20 minutes, and once in place, it will provide pain relief to a rheumatoid-arthritis patient for a decade or more before it needs servicing. On one occasion during my travels with Famm, I got to hold SetPoint’s newfangled microregulator. For now, it’s only capable of transmitting very crude signals to communicate with the nervous system — more like grunts and groans rather than the precise vocabulary that Slaoui envisions for bioelectronic therapies. Even so, the microregulator felt elegant and powerful and promising in my palm. “A patient gets a device like this implanted once for one disease, and they’re done,” Tracey says. “No prescriptions, no medicines, no injections. That’s the future. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 14:19:15 +0000