Electrical stimulation reprogrammes immune system – Information & Occasions

Posted on: 02 September 2025

This breakthrough uncovers a doubtlessly highly effective new therapeutic possibility, with additional work ongoing to delineate the specifics.

Macrophages are a sort of white blood cell with a number of high-profile roles in our immune system. They patrol across the physique, surveying for bugs and viruses, in addition to disposing of lifeless and broken cells, and stimulating different immune cells – kicking them into gear when and the place they’re wanted.

However, their actions may also drive native irritation within the physique, which might generally get uncontrolled and grow to be problematic, inflicting extra injury to the physique than restore. This is current in numerous completely different illnesses, highlighting the necessity to regulate macrophages for improved affected person outcomes. 

In the brand new research, simply printed within the worldwide journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the Trinity group labored with human macrophages remoted from heathy donor blood samples offered through the Irish Blood Transfusion Board, St James’s Hospital. They stimulated these cells utilizing a customized bioreactor to use electrical currents and measured what occurred.

“We have known for a very long time that the immune system is vital for repairing damage in our body and that macrophages play a central role in fighting infection and guiding tissue repair,” stated Dr Sinead O’Rourke, Research Fellow in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, and first creator of the analysis article. 

“As a result, many scientists are exploring ways to ‘reprogramme’ macrophages to encourage faster, more effective healing in disease and to limit the unwanted side-effects that come with overly aggressive inflammation. And while there is growing evidence that electrical stimulation may help control how different cells behave during wound healing, very little was known about how it affects human macrophages prior to this work.”

“We are really excited by the findings. Not only does this study show for the first time that electrical stimulation can shift human macrophages to suppress inflammation, we have also demonstrated increased ability of macrophages to repair tissue, supporting electrical stimulation as an exciting new therapy to boost the body’s own repair processes in a huge range of different injury and disease situations.”

The findings from the interdisciplinary group led by Trinity investigators, Professor Aisling Dunne (School of Biochemistry and Immunology) and Professor Michael Monaghan (School of Engineering) is particularly important on condition that this work was carried out with human blood cells (exhibiting its effectiveness for actual sufferers); electrical stimulation is comparatively secure and simple within the scheme of therapeutic choices; and the outcomes needs to be relevant to a variety of situations.

Corresponding creator Prof. Monaghan added: “Among the future steps are to explore more advanced regimes of electrical stimulation to generate more precise and prolonged effects on inflammatory cells and to explore new materials and modalities of delivering electric fields. This concept has yielded compelling effects in vitro and has huge potential in a wide range of inflammatory diseases.”

The work was supported by a Trinity College Dublin Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Intrafaculty PhD Award; the EPSRC and Research Ireland Centre for Doctoral Training in Engineered Tissues for Discovery, Industry and Medicine; Research Ireland Centres co-funded underneath the European Regional Development Fund: CÚRAM and AMBER; the European Research Council; and a Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future award.