Intelligent healing for complex wounds
The body’s natural healing processes could get a boost fro a bioelectronic interface to deliver faster recovery from wounds with fewer complications. (Image from DARPA)
Recent advances in biosensors, actuators and artificial intelligence could be extended and integrated to dramatically improve tissue regeneration, according to DARPA researchers. The agency’s Bioelectronics for Tissue Regeneration (BETR) program is asking researchers to develop bioelectronics that closely track the progress of a wound and then stimulate healing processes in real-time to optimize tissue repair and regeneration.
BETR program manager Paul Sheehan described his vision for the technology as “not just personalized medicine, but dynamic, adaptive, and precise human therapies” that adjust to the wound state moment by moment. BETR technology would represent a sharp break from traditional wound treatments, and even from other emerging technologies to facilitate recovery, most of which are passive in nature, according to a statement from DARPA.
Passive approaches often result in slow healing, incomplete healing with scarring, or, in some cases, no healing at all. Blast injuries, in particular, seem to scramble the healing processes; 23% of them will not fully close. Moreover, research shows that in nearly two-thirds of military trauma cases — a rate far higher than with civilian trauma injuries — these patients suffer abnormal bone growth in their soft tissue due to heterotopic ossification, a painful condition that can greatly limit mobility.
DARPA intends to use any available signal, be it optical, biochemical, bioelectronic, or mechanical, to directly monitor the body’s physiological processes and then to stimulate them to bring them under control, thereby speeding healing or avoiding scarring or other forms of abnormal healing.
By the conclusion of the four-year BETR program, DARPA expects researchers to demonstrate a closed-loop, adaptive system that includes sensors to assess wound state and track the body’s complex responses to interventions; biological actuators that transmit appropriate biochemical and biophysical signals precisely over space and time to influence healing; and adaptive learning approaches to process data, build models, and determine interventions. To succeed, the BETR system must yield faster healing of recalcitrant wounds, superior scar-free healing, and/or the ability to redirect abnormally healing wounds toward a more beneficial pathway.
