Biotech companies are pioneering research to use electricity to cure diseases. Here’s how

Electricity is gaining newfound traction as a potential treatment for diseases, from rheumatoid arthritis to hard-to-treat cancers including glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer.

Pacemakers for decades have delivered electric pulses to keep heartbeats steady, and electroconvulsive therapy has helped people with serious mental illness after other treatments have failed. Now new technologies and devices are widening the scope of how electric fields and pulses could be used as medicine. 

Biotech companies and researchers, including Novocure, SetPoint Medical and the University of Cincinnati, are deciphering how to shrink device sizes, deploy electric fields and hijack a person’s own immune response.

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“We’re leveraging the electrical properties of cancer cells,” says Ashley Cordova, chief executive officer of oncology company Novocure, which developed technology that disrupts electrical forces at play in cell division to slow down tumor growth. “We think about bodies as being biological beings or as chemical beings, but we also are electrical beings.”

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