 "Bioelectronics open up another leg of medical therapy: Dr Mosongo Moukwa")
The idea of a bionic man is no longer science fiction. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a pharmaceuticals firm, and Verily Life Science, a division of Alphabet (the parent company of Google), have teamed up to tackle chronic conditions with a joint venture, Galvani Bioelectronics. The new company is named after Luigi Aloisio Galavani, an 18th century pioneer of electrical experimentation. It will receive $ 640 million over seven years to develop bioelectronic treatments for a range of chronic diseases, including arthritis, asthma, and diabetes.
GSK and Verify Life Science have independently decided that it was time to use electrical pulses that run along the human nervous system to treat diseases, rather than drugs and vaccines acting through chemistry and biology. GSK has been working on bioelectronic medicines since 2012 in a push to develop new patentable treatments as its Advair respiratory treatment faced competition from generic versions. It has invested $50 million in a venture capital fund for bioelectronics and provided funding for scientists outside the company working in the field.
This is an opportunity for dramatically increased synergy between electronics and biology, fostered by the march of electronics technologies to the atomic scale and rapid advances in system, cell, and molecular biology. Bioelectronic remedies attach battery-powered implants the size of a grain of rice or smaller to individual nerves to correct faulty electrical signals between the nervous system and the body’s organs. This is a new territory. Bioelectronic medicine could have a huge impact across many different therapeutic areas.
Asthma could be relieved by altering nerve signals and open up the airways of asthma sufferers during crisis. Stimulating the longest human nerve that runs down the body from the brainstem could reduce the inflammation caused by rheumatoid arthritis. So far, implants have only been tested on animals but the goal is to produce treatments that supplement or replace drugs that often come with side-effects.
GSK will hold 55 percent stake in the joint venture and Verify Life Science will hold the rest. In this collaboration, GSK will focus on discovering more about the biology of the nervous system, how individual nerves control the functioning of specific organs and how best to intervene in their electrical signals. Verily Life Science, on the other hand, will contribute expertise in electronics miniaturization, and data and software for clinical purposes.
By collaborating with Verify Life Science, GSK hopes to enhance miniaturisation and monitoring through software and analytics. The science of bioelectronics is not new. It dates back more than 200 years ago when Galvani’s experimented on frogs. Heart pacemakers represent a more recent example. Many academics have been working in this field of bioelectronics.
Generally, US academics have focused on developing miniature implants to tap into nerves, while European counterparts have focused on the biology of the nervous system. The most visible bioelectronics programs are those sponsored by the US government at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
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Verify Life Science has had collaboration with Norvatis in the making of contact lenses that can measure glucose level in the blood. It also partnered with Biogen in the study of multiple sclerosis through the use of data analytics. In 2015, it worked with Sanofi to better manage diabetes. In the same year, it founded Verb Surgical, a firm with expertise in surgical robotics.
Galvani Bioelectronics represents an ambitious collaboration, allowing GSK and Verily to combine forces and have a huge impact on an emerging field. Bioelectronic medicine is a new area of therapeutic exploration, and success will require the confluence of deep disease biology expertise and new highly miniaturised technologies.
In the next decade, it may become possible to restore vision or reverse the effects of spinal cord injury or disease. It may be possible for a lab-on-a-chip to allow medical diagnoses without a clinic or instantaneous biological agent detection.
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Dr Mosongo Moukwa is director of technology at PolyOne, USA, and was recently an independent consultant based in Chapel Hill, USA, and vice president - technology at Asian Paints Ltd, Mumbai, India. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and Product Development Management Association.
Email: mosongo@mosongomoukwa.com