Neuroengineers at Rice University https://www.rice.edu and the Texas Medical Center https://www.tmc.edu are teaming up to create implantable wirelessly powered nerve stimulators that could be used in place of opioids for pain management.
Neuropathic pain can be a disabling disorder that accounts for nearly 40% of chronic pain suffering, which often leads to anxiety, depression, and opioid addiction. As an alternative to opioids, the implantable nerve stimulators will be small enough to be placed on stents and delivered within blood vessels adjacent to specific areas of the central and peripheral nervous system.
The research is being funded by a NIH grant for $945 million as part of the “Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative” https://heal.nih.gov launched in 2018. HEAL aims to improve treatments for chronic pain, curb the rates of opioid use disorder and overdose, and achieve long term recovery from opioid addiction.
The NIH grant funding is enabling researchers at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering https://engineering.rice.edu, Baylor College of Medicine https://www.bcm.edu, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) https://uth.edu to develop the new endovascular nerve stimulation technology.
According to the project’s Principle Investigator Peter Tze Man Kan, a Baylor Neurosurgeon, “Research has shown that electrical stimulation is an effective treatment for reducing pain when doctors target the spinal cord and the dorsal root ganglia, or DRG, a bundle of nerves that carry sensory information to the spinal cord. There are DRG stimulators, but they require surgery to implant a battery pack and pulse generator.”
Researchers report, that when devices are small enough to be delivered through blood vessels, powering them with electromagnetic waves or magnetic induction is inefficient. For that reason, electronic stimulation therapies today now rely on wired devices. The goal is to create a new wireless endovascular nerve stimulation technology, where patients will be able to wear a magnetic field generator that will deliver power.