Your body has a problem with foreign objects. When doctors implant a device on a peripheral nerve—the kind that might regulate blood pressure or restore sensation—your immune system treats it like an invader. Dense scar tissue forms around the device within weeks, degrading its performance until it stops working altogether.
Researchers at MIT have found a way to stop this rejection entirely.
The key is adhesion. By coating bioelectronic devices with a sticky bioadhesive, the team prevented fibrotic encapsulation—that scarring process—across six different peripheral nerves in rodent models for up to 12 weeks. More remarkably, they kept the devices working flawlessly the entire time, with minimal immune cell activity and almost no collagen or scar tissue formation.
"We discovered that adhering the bioelectrodes to peripheral nerves can fully prevent the formation of fibrosis on the interfaces," says Xuanhe Zhao, the MIT professor leading the work. The adhesive layer essentially tells the immune system: this belongs here. Leave it alone.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxWhy This Matters for Real People
The immediate application is hypertension—high blood pressure that doesn't respond to medication. More than half of hypertensive patients fall into this "resistant" category, and their options are limited. Current nerve-stimulation therapies work, but they come with side effects: irregular heartbeat, breathing problems, persistent cough.
The MIT team tested their adhesive device on the deep peroneal nerve in the lower leg, a point long used in traditional acupuncture for blood pressure regulation. Over four weeks, the device achieved sustained blood pressure reduction without metabolic side effects. The nerve stayed stimulated, the device stayed clean, and the body never mounted an immune response.
After 12 weeks of continuous stimulation, tissue samples showed almost nothing—minimal immune cells, minimal scar tissue, minimal collagen. "The contrast between the immune response of the adhered device and that of the non-adhered control is striking," says Bastien Aymon, a co-author on the study. "The fact that we can observe immunologically pristine interfaces after three months of adhesive implantation is extremely encouraging for future clinical translation."
This isn't just about blood pressure. The strategy works across different nerve types and different implant designs. That means the same adhesive approach could extend the lifespan of any bioelectronic device implanted on a peripheral nerve—prosthetics that restore sensation, devices that manage chronic pain, systems that regulate other autonomic functions.
The research was published in Science Advances in 2025. Human trials are the next step, but the preclinical data suggests that the era of short-lived implants may be ending.
