Harnessing Bioelectricity to Combat Infection

“An infection is a conversation between host and microbe. Some of that conversation is chemical, and some of it is electrical — and the electrical part has been the quieter half of the story.”

— Nev Zubcevik, DO, Co-founder & Chief Medical Officer

We tend to picture infection and wound healing as purely biochemical events — a cascade of signaling molecules, immune cells, and microbes. That picture is correct but incomplete. Repair and defense are also bioelectric processes. Injured tissue generates its own electrical gradients, and those endogenous fields help steer immune cells and repair cells toward the site that needs them. The body, in other words, uses electricity as a kind of GPS for healing.

As an engineer, I find that framing useful because it suggests where to intervene. If a native electric field guides cells to a wound, then a weak or disrupted field — common in conditions like diabetes — is a signal problem. And signal problems are tractable: you can measure them, model them, and, in principle, restore them.

The neural-immune axis

There is a second electrical layer worth naming. The nervous and immune systems talk to each other, and experimental vagus nerve stimulation has been studied as a way to modulate inflammation through that link. This matters for infection because too little immune response lets pathogens win, while too much drives tissue damage and systemic harm. The goal is not to crank the dial in either direction but to help the system find its own balance.

Bacterial colonies magnified under the microscope. Electrome's approach to this domain is built like a control system. We combine electrophysiological mapping to read the local state, closed-loop feedback stimulation to act on it, and immune-response modeling to anticipate how a given input is likely to play out. The intent is individualized therapy — protocols shaped to a specific wound on a specific patient, not a fixed program applied to everyone.

“If we can speak to cells in their own electrical language, we change the economics of medicine, not just the science.”

— Ken Mayer, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer

Mechanisms under study, and why scale matters

Several mechanisms are being explored, and I want to keep them in the conditional tense because that is where the science honestly sits. Targeted fields may help direct leukocytes toward a site, improve local perfusion so that oxygen and immune cells arrive, and disrupt the protective biofilms that let bacteria shrug off antibiotics. Used alongside antimicrobials rather than instead of them, electrical approaches are being studied as a complementary strategy — especially relevant as antimicrobial resistance keeps rising.

Osteomyelitis and other hard-to-reach infections

Device-associated infections where biofilms dominate

Systemic inflammation that needs damping without broad immune suppression

Finally, there is an access argument that an engineer should never ignore. Wound care and infection management generate enormous global costs, much of it tied to specialty visits. Devices that are home-based and remotely monitored could move competent care closer to where people actually live. The best signal in the world is worthless if it cannot reach the patient.

A researcher inspects a culture sample in the laboratory.