Scientists have made history with a device that successfully eavesdrops on the neuronal chatter between the brain and the gut, furthering our understanding of its intrinsic interconnectedness – and how it drives health and disease throughout the body.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Dartmouth College developed a device thinner than a human hair designed to sit between colon layers unnoticed, capturing signals sent up to the brain and pulses it received in return. This crucial information pathway makes up the enteric nervous system (ENS), an often overlooked branch compared with the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. The ENS, with up to 600 million neurons – made up of 20 different types of these nerve cells – is the gatekeeper of the gastrointestinal tract, involved in all its complex processes and movements, and plays a key role when things go wrong.
University of Cambridge
“Because the ENS neural activity is ‘dampened’ down under anaesthesia, the ability to record in awake animals is crucial, as it allows recording of the ENS while the animal experiences stress or during and after eating,” explained lead researcher Róisín Owens, from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. “This new technology will build a better understanding how the gut and brain communicate, and it could lead to new treatments for digestive and neurological disorders.”
There’s growing evidence that a suite of neurological conditions may be driven by the ENS. Recently, we’ve unlocked new understanding about the role the gut’s microbiome plays in mental health disorders and other health issues that have traditionally been seen as originating in and staying local to the brain. Now, it seems the gut-brain axis is a much stronger pathway than it appears.
And this is where the new nano-device comes in. It’s a soft, flexible electronic implant that can be inserted during an outpatient laparoscopy procedure. So far, it’s only been tested in rodents and pigs, but the researchers were able to demonstrate that the device could record electrophysiological activity in the gut for two weeks without issue, opening up a new avenue of diagnosing and treating conditions with a wealth of real-time data gathered by the device. This means new ways of intervening when it comes to conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.
“The gut’s nervous system has been historically difficult to access, and we show here not only that it can be done, but that we can extract fairly intricate information,” said co-first author Alex Boys from Dartmouth.
University of Cambridge
While it’s still early days, being able to perform this sort of biological wiretap could help unravel many conditions that remain difficult to treat due to the deceptive but immense complexity of the ENS.
“With our chronic implant technology, we can, for the first time, record real-time electrophysiology signals from the ‘second brain’ in the gut over extended periods,” said co-first author Amparo Güemes Gonzalez. “This allows us to study how the gut responds to physiological stimuli, such as stress, and how it reacts to treatments or dietary changes, something that wasn’t possible with previous methods. This opens the door to a much deeper understanding of gut–brain communication and its impact on health.
“It was just not possible to do this before,” she added.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Source: University of Cambridge