A frog’s leg twitches when a wire touches it—and that same bioelectricity, still poorly understood, may hold the key to healing wounds and controlling organ growth. This project tackles a fundamental gap: while pacemakers manage heart rhythms and electric fields guide cell repair, scientists lack the tools and cross-disciplinary insight to study bioelectricity alongside other biological signals like mechanical forces and molecular patterns. The research will build intricate bioelectronic devices that can simultaneously measure and influence multiple electrical inputs and outputs in living tissues. It will also create a network linking bioengineers, developmental biologists, biophysicists, and clinicians to work together on the problem. This is primarily curiosity-driven fundamental science. If successful, it could transform bioengineering by enabling precise electrical control over cell behaviour—potentially leading to new ways to heal wounds, regenerate tissue, or regulate organ size without drugs or surgery. Past fundamental work on bioelectricity gave us pacemakers; this project aims to unlock what else electricity can do inside the body.
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Bioelectricity is the presence and movement of electrical charges inside living organisms. It plays a critical role in the operation and regulation of life and is responsible for many fascinating natural phenomena. However, it remains one of the least well understood aspects of life. Much of the scientific research has evolved into separate fields. We're familiar with pacemakers that help regulate electrical signals within the heart, but perhaps less aware of the role electric fields play in helping guide cells to heal our wounds or regulate the size of our organs during our fundamental development. In some areas of research, our experiments are comparable to Luigi Galvani's work placing wires in frogs' legs, back in the late 1700s. Joined up thinking about bioelectricity, combining insights from multiple research disciplines is needed, along with better experimental techniques. At the same time, our new tools must be able to contextualise the role of bioelectricity alongside all the other factors that influence living cell and tissue behaviour (for example, external forces and the patterns of different biologically active molecules). This project will establish new methods for developing our understanding of bioelectricity. It will do this by building intricate bioelectronic devices that reflect the complexity of biological and bioengineering problems by incorporating many inputs and measuring many outputs at once. At the same time, it will also provide a network for bringing bioengineers, developmental biologists, biophysicists, and clinicians to further investigate the role of bioelectricity together.
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