Faced increasingly with clinical cases where a traumatic agent either detaches the motor nerve from the muscle or damages the neuromuscular junction (NMJ), classic procedures like nerve suture or graft may not be applicable. A similar scenario arises in surgical tumor removals. To reinnervate denervated muscles, a proposed solution involves implanting the proximal nerve stump divided into artificial branches, known as direct muscle neurotization, though the outcomes vary. Following nerve injury, the NMJ undergoes a series of changes that can contribute to dysfunction, including loss of synaptic architecture, neurotransmitters and maintaining mechanism of postsynaptic microenvironment of denervated skeletal muscle.
Electroceuticals, also known as bioelectronic medicine or neural engineering, refer to the use of electrical stimulation to modulate the function of the body's neural system for therapeutic purposes. Electroceuticals aim to treat various health conditions by interfacing with the body's nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves, to regulate physiological processes such as pain perception, inflammation, and organ function. Electroceuticals can potentially play a role in promoting NMJ regeneration by modulating the activity of the motor neurons that innervate skeletal muscle.
In this talk, I will briefly introduce our recent electroceutical strategy for NMJ regeneration. Via direct distal nerve electrical stimulation, NMJ degradation is ameliorated with decreased muscle atrophy. In addition, the skeletal muscle injury associated gene are downregulated under feeding distal nerve electrical stimulation. Electroceuticals facilitate direct muscle neurotization in terms of NMJ regeneration at the denervated muscle. Long-term functional improvement is achieved with increased nerve reinnervation and NMJ regeneration. The strategy of electroceuticals provide promising benefit for improving neuromuscular interface regeneration via enhancing distal axon reinnervation per se.