Clinical data, measurements, and patients’ own reports are collected longitudinally over the course of inflammatory bowel disease. The project made use of mathematical modelling to try to predict the course of inflammation. The researchers’ anticipation was that treatment efforts could be optimised and disease episodes alleviated and shortened through better prognosis of flare-ups in inflammatory diseases.
The project was co-directed by Peder Olofsson, Medical Doctor and Professor in Bioelectronic Bedicine at Karolinska Institutet, and Henrik Hult, Professor in Mathematical Statistics at KTH.
The project was conducted within the programme Bioelectronic Medicine.
By analysing large amounts of data from the vagus nerve during experimental inflammation, the project aimed to identify signal patterns that represent inflammation intensity. The goal was to create a lexicon of signal patterns to extract detailed information about the inflammation. The researchers used data available in the literature and their own data to develop machine learning methods, based on auto-encoders and clustering, for identifying nerve signals that can be linked to different cytokines. Pro-inflammatory cytokines are produced by the immune system and secreted in response to injury, stress or inflammation, among other things. The results show that the new techniques are effective for identifying relevant signal types, especially for TNF, but also that there is considerable variation between different recordings and that it is very important to be able to conduct controlled experiments with improved signal quality in the future.
The programme was co-directed by Peder Olofsson, Medical Doctor and Professor in Bioelectronic Bedicine at Karolinska Institutet, and Henrik Hult, Professor in Mathematical Statistics at KTH.
The project was conducted within the programme Bioelectronic Medicine.
Stimulation of the vagus nerve may be the anti-inflammatory treatment of the future.
Inflammatory diseases cause a great deal of suffering for patients all over the world, as well as creating challenges for healthcare. Imagine an implant that sends electrical pulses to a nerve instructing it to signal the immune system to suppress inflammation in the body. Trials are already underway on patients with chronic inflammation, with promising results. Bioelectronic medicine may be able to reduce the use of anti-inflammatory drugs, as well as direct treatment to the inflamed body part.
The focus of the programme was on being able to monitor and stimulate the vital vagus nerve with short electrical pulses in order to treat inflammatory diseases in a targeted manner. This was the first programme in the world to clinically implement bioelectronic medicine to treat inflammatory diseases at the point of care. Beginning in January 2020, this interdisciplinary collaboration brought together physicians, immunologists, engineers, and mathematicians. Research was primarily focused on studying how signals are transmitted between nerves and immune cells at a molecular level and which parts of the long vagus nerve communicate with the immune system, because, even if clinical data is available to demonstrate the potential of the method, there is still some way to go before it can be implemented in healthcare.
The programme was co-directed by Peder Olofsson, Medical doctor and docent at Karolinska Institutet, and Henrik Hult, Professor in Mathematical statistics at KTH.