A Kolkata born scientist who once studied electronics in Dhanbad is now at the centre of a medical breakthrough that could redefine brain treatment worldwide. Deblina Sarkar, an IIT graduate and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has unveiled a technology that can slip through the bloodstream, find diseased spots in the brain, and implant itself without a single surgical cut.
Her invention, described in Nature Biotechnology and first reported in detail by New Atlas, opens the door to treating some of the most challenging neurological illnesses using nothing more than an injection in the arm.
The platform is called Circulatronics. It uses swarms of sub cellular electronic chips known as SWEDs, small enough to sit on a blood cell. New Atlas notes that they are roughly one billionth the length of a grain of rice, yet powerful enough to deliver targeted electrical stimulation deep inside the brain.
These SWEDs are fused with immune cells called monocytes. Once inside the bloodstream, the hybrid cell electronics follow the body's natural immune traffic, crossing the blood brain barrier to reach inflamed or diseased regions.
According to the report, when a near infrared laser is shone from outside the skull, these devices activate and begin modulating electrical activity in precise clusters of neurons. In mouse tests, they successfully implanted themselves at the targeted region within seventy two hours and sparked focused activation in an area as small as thirty micrometers.
For decades, deep brain stimulation has been seen as a powerful alternative for disorders such as depression, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, and brain tumors. The challenge has always been the same: electrodes need to be surgically inserted into the brain.
In her presentation at the MIT Media Lab, Sarkar explains why this is inaccessible for most of the world. “Existing technologies require creating a hole in the skull and putting a centimeter scale probe in,” she said, noting risks of infection and high costs. “Because of this invasiveness and the hundred thousand dollars of brain surgery, these technologies are limited to less than one percent of patients.”
Circulatronics aims to remove that barrier entirely. Sarkar told the lab’s audience that the chip can “travel seamlessly through the body fluids without being attacked by the immune system” and “self implant in a precise diseased location in the brain with just a simple injection in the arm.”
New Atlas reports that the team is now refining the technology to treat brain cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and chronic pain, and is studying how future chips might even sense activity or act as synthetic electronic neurons.
The research team from MIT, Wellesley College, and Harvard University first created a tiny inflamed region inside a mouse brain to mimic human neurological disease. Within days, the SWED monocyte hybrids had travelled to the exact site.
