Reference: October 2025 | Issue 10 | Vol 11 | Page 60
Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered that electrical stimulation modulates human macrophage function to favour tissue repair. The breakthrough offers a potential new therapeutic option to combat degenerative disease and promote effective tissue repair.
In the new study published in the international journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the Trinity team worked with human macrophages isolated from healthy donor blood samples provided via the Irish Blood Transfusion Board at St James’s Hospital. They stimulated these cells using a custom-designed bioreactor to apply electrical currents and measured what happened.
The team demonstrated that electrical stimulation exhibits an immunomodulatory effect on primary human macrophages, promoting an anti-inflammatory pro-regenerative phenotype, accompanied by decreased inflammatory macrophage marker expression and enhanced expression of angiogenic genes.
Furthermore, the research highlighted the ability of electrically-stimulated macrophages to promote angiogenic tube formation in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), as well as mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) migration in a wound scratch model.
The authors say the findings “endorse electrical stimulation as a viable therapeutic strategy for the modulation of macrophages across multiple injury and defence microenvironments.
“We have known for a very long time that the immune system is vital for repairing damage in our body and that macrophages play a central role in fighting infection and guiding tissue repair,” said Dr Sinead O’Rourke, Research Fellow in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, and first author of the research article.
“As a result, many scientists are exploring ways to ‘reprogramme’ macrophages to encourage faster, more effective healing in disease, and to limit the unwanted side effects that come with overly aggressive inflammation.
“And while there is growing evidence that electrical stimulation may help control how different cells behave during wound healing, very little was known about how it affects human macrophages prior to this work.
“We are really excited by the findings. Not only does this study show for the first time that electrical stimulation can shift human macrophages to suppress inflammation, we have also demonstrated increased ability of macrophages to repair tissue, supporting electrical stimulation as an exciting new therapy to boost the body’s own repair processes in a huge range of different injury and disease situations.”
The findings from the interdisciplinary team – led by Prof Aisling Dunne from the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, and Prof Michael Monaghan from the School of Engineering – are especially significant given that this work was performed with human blood cells, showing its effectiveness for real patients.
Writing in the Cell Reports Physical Science, the authors say electrical stimulation is relatively safe and easy in the scheme of therapeutic options, and the outcomes should be applicable to a wide range of scenarios.
Corresponding author, Prof Monaghan, added: “Among the future steps are to explore more advanced regimes of electrical stimulation to generate more precise and prolonged effects on inflammatory cells and to explore new materials and modalities of delivering electric fields. This concept has yielded compelling effects in vitro and has huge potential in a wide range of inflammatory diseases.”
The work was supported by the European Research Council and a Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future award.
Reference
O’Rourke SA, Suku M, Petrousek S, et al. Electromodulation of human monocyte-derived macrophages drives a regenerative phenotype and impedes inflammation. Cell Rep Phys Sci. 2025; 6(9): 102795. doi: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2025.102795
