ZAPPING WHITE BLOOD CELLS MAKES THEM HEAL BODY FASTER
Electrically stimulating key cells in the immune system could "reprogram" them to reduce inflammation and encourage faster and more effective healing in the body.
This is the discovery of scientists from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland who say their findings could lead to a powerful therapeutic option to help "boost the body's own repair processes in a huge range of different injury and disease situations."
The targeted cells are called 'macrophages,' a type of white blood cell that plays several important roles in our immune system, including patrolling around the body and surveying for bugs and viruses.
They also dispose of dead and damaged cells and stimulate other immune cells—"kicking them into gear" when needed, the researchers explain.
However, their actions can also drive local inflammation in the body, which can sometimes get out of control and cause issues, leading to more damage in the body than repair. This happens in multiple diseases and highlights the need to regulate macrophages for improved patient outcomes, according to the team.
"We have understood before that the electrical signals can improve healing of skin wounds, or in the bone, for example. There were several animal studies that highlighted how immune cells, macrophages, are potentially involved in this response," Sinead O'Rourke, study author and biochemistry and immunology researcher at Trinity, told Newsweek.
"We have now for the first time explicitly demonstrated that electrical stimulation reprograms macrophages to enhance their reparative function. Furthermore, we have emphasized the translational capacity of this work through the use of human cells in our study."
The researchers worked with human macrophages isolated from healthy donor blood samples provided via a blood donation center in Dublin. They stimulated these cells using a custom "bioreactor" to apply electrical currents and measured what happened.
"This allowed us to deliver a pulsed electrical signal to the monolayer of cells for one hour and then characterize cell response in the following 24–72 hours," O'Rourke explained.
"There are already devices implemented in the clinic for patients to administer electrical stimulation for wound healing. With our new understanding of what specific regimes regulate immune cells, we could perhaps enhance the effectiveness of these devices in the future."
The scientists discovered the stimulation caused a shift of macrophages into an anti-inflammatory state that supports faster tissue repair and a decrease in inflammatory marker (signaling) activity.
It also caused an increase in expression of genes that promote the formation of new blood vessels (associated with tissue repair as new tissues form) and an increase in stem cell recruitment into wounds (also associated with tissue repair).
"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," said O'Rourke in a statement.
She explained further they can potentially see the first areas of progression for "patients with chronic wounds or diabetic ulcers, where electrical wound healing devices are already being tested."
"But this is only the start," O'Rourke added. "We could also investigate a number of degenerative diseases, as well as nerve repair and bone fractures."
The study, performed with human blood cells, suggests the approach would be effective for real patients. Electrical stimulation is relatively safe and easy and the outcomes could be applied to a wide range of scenarios, according to the researchers.
However, O'Rourke explained, "there is still a while to go before we truly understand the mechanism of how electrical stimulation regulates these cells and, because of this, we have yet to identify the major limitations to electrical stimulation as a potential therapy.
"Our next 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 electrical fields. This is an exciting new avenue of research that will be led by professor Michael Monaghan and his research group at Trinity College.
"While this could mean we are still a while away from treating real patients, it has brought us a step closer to making that clinical translation a reality."
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Reference
O'Rourke, S. A., Suku, M., Petrousek, S., Hoey, D. A., Dunne, A., & Monaghan, M. G. (2025). Electromodulation of human monocyte-derived macrophages drives a regenerative phenotype and impedes inflammation. Cell Reports Physical Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2025.102795
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2025-09-02T15:33:09Z