Accelerating the development of bioelectronic medicine: outcomes and innovations from the NIH SPARC initiative
Bhavesh Patel, Victor Pikov, Margot S. Damaser, Jyl Boline, Susan J. Tappan, David P. Nickerson, Matthew P. Ward, Pallavi K. Gunalan, Esra Neufeld, Kip A. Ludwig, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Joost B. Wagenaar, Maryann E. Martone · 2026
Read Accelerating the development of bioelectronic medicine: outcomes and innovations from the NIH SPARC initiative by Bhavesh Patel, Victor Pikov, Margot S. Damaser, Jyl Boline, Susan J. Tappan, David P. Nickerson, Matthew P. Ward, Pallavi K. Gunalan, Esra Neufeld, Kip A. Ludwig, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Joost B. Wagenaar, Maryann E. Martone (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13543476.txt.
Description
Bhavesh Patel and co-authors wrote a 2026 paper reviewing a large United States program on bioelectronic medicine. The program, called SPARC, ran from 2015 to 2025 under the National Institutes of Health. Its aim was to treat disease by tuning the nerves that run the organs, rather than with drugs alone.
Teams mapped how the autonomic nerves connect to organs across species. Others built new tools to record and stimulate those nerves. A shared data and modeling hub let groups reuse each other's maps and models. The paper sums up what the program produced across its four work areas. It argues the groundwork can speed new nerve-based devices toward the clinic.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Bhavesh Patel, Victor Pikov, Margot S. Damaser, Jyl Boline, Susan J. Tappan, David P. Nickerson, Matthew P. Ward, Pallavi K. Gunalan, Esra Neufeld, Kip A. Ludwig, Jeffrey S. Grethe, Joost B. Wagenaar, Maryann E. Martone |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 69 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |