2023-05-12 06:00:33
What can connect the Horrible Moloch, or horned devil, a small lizard from the Australian deserts, and humans suffering from gastrointestinal, metabolic diseases or even anorexia? Thanks to the ingenuity of American researchers, the observation of the former could well lead to an original treatment strategy for the latter. In a article published on April 26 by the journal Science Robotics, Khalil Ramadi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]Cambridge) and his colleagues indeed describe a prototype of an ingestible capsule making it possible to modulate appetite-stimulating hormones such as ghrelin in pigs, by electrical stimulation of the cells of the gastric wall.
And it is by taking inspiration from the subtle capacities of the horned devil to extract moisture that scientists have been able to overcome one of the challenges for such a device: to create in the liquid medium that is the stomach points of contact robust between the electrodes and the mucosa, and the conditions for a good progress of the device along the digestive wall. To stay hydrated in the Australian desert, the Horrible Moloch uses its skin like a network of straws capable of sucking up water from wet sand and carrying it to its mouth, as a German team demonstrated a few years ago. On the same principle as this entanglement of channels between the scales acting as a moisture extractor, the MIT researchers have developed a system of grooves on the surface of the capsule, on which the electrodes are wound.
Khalil Ramadi and his colleagues had another source of inspiration: a gastric neurostimulation device intended to relieve chronic nausea and vomiting in patients with gastroparesis. This pathology, associated among other things with diabetes, is characterized by a slowing down of gastric emptying. In severe cases, refractory to drug treatment, patients may be offered the equivalent of a digestive pacemaker, with a neurostimulation box under the skin and electrodes surgically sutured to the level of the outer membrane of the stomach (serosa ). Assuming that the neuromodulation thus obtained takes place through both nervous and hormonal pathways, the American scientists had the idea of designing a less invasive stimulation device, acting locally, inside the digestive tract. , and then being eliminated naturally.
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