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• Posted November 10, 2025

Injectable, Self-Implanting Chips Offer Hope For Brain Disorders

Imagine a brain implant that could be placed without surgically opening a person’s skull, but instead through a simple injection in the arm.

Massachusetts Intitute of Technology researchers are working on microscopic, wireless electronic chips that can travel through the bloodstream and self-implant in a targeted region of the brain.

In a study with lab mice, the team found that the chips — each one-billionth the length of a grain of rice — can indeed identify and migrate to a specific brain region without human guidance.

Once in place, these chips can provide electrical stimulation of the sort now used to treat conditions like Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and depression, researchers said.

“Our tiny electronic devices seamlessly integrate with the neurons and co-live and co-exist with the brain cells creating a unique brain-computer symbiosis,” said senior researcher Deblina Sarkar, an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering.

“We are working dedicatedly to employ this technology for treating neural diseases, where drugs or standard therapies fail, for alleviating human suffering and envision a future where humans could transcend beyond diseases and biological limitations,” she said in a news release.

The tiny chips are integrated with living biological cells before they are injected, which protects them from a person’s immune system and allows them to harmlessly cross the blood-brain barrier, researchers said.

“Our cell-electronics hybrid fuses the versatility of electronics with the biological transport and biochemical sensing prowess of living cells,” Sarkar said. “The living cells camouflage the electronics so that they aren’t attacked by the body’s immune system and they can travel seamlessly through the bloodstream. This also enables them to squeeze through the intact blood-brain barrier without the need to invasively open it.”

Brain implants typically require hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical fees, not to mention the risks that go along with brain surgery, researchers noted.

With the lab mice, the team showed that these chips could help reduce brain inflammation by providing deep brain electrical stimulation, which is also called neuromodulation.

But the researchers say that different cell types could be used to target specific regions of the brain, depending on the condition being treated.

“This is a platform technology and may be employed to treat multiple brain diseases and mental illnesses,” Sarkar says. “Also, this technology is not just confined to the brain but could also be extended to other parts of the body in future.”

Because the chips are so tiny, they offer much higher precision than conventional brain implants, researchers said.

When they’ve reached their intended target, a doctor would use electromagnetic waves to power them up and enable electrical stimulation of neurons.

The new mouse study was published Nov. 5 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on deep brain stimulation.

SOURCE: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, news release, Nov. 5, 2025