• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

First-Of-Its-Kind Vagus Nerve Implant Gets FDA Approval As A Therapy For Rheumatoid Arthritis

August 1, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

A first-of-its-kind implant has just been granted approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Developed by SetPoint Medical, the neuroimmune modulation device works by delivering electrical stimulation to the vagus nerve once a day to initiate the body’s innate anti-inflammatory pathways. It essentially prods the body to use the tools it already has to get inflammation under control, marking a novel approach to managing autoimmune disease.

Dr Kevin J Tracey, co-founder of SetPoint Medical and author of The Great Nerve, is the first to admit that when it comes to the vagus nerve, there’s a lot of misinformation floating around. Underneath the people trying to sell you things, however, is an intriguing new field of medicine that aims to hijack this superhighway, but what does the vagus nerve actually do?

Signals traveling in the vagus nerve are operating at the level of reflexes.

Dr Kevin J Tracey

“It carries the signals back and forth between your body and your brain that maintain a balanced function of all your organs, so you don’t have to think about it,” Tracey told IFLScience in the August issue of CURIOUS. “Signals traveling in the vagus nerve are operating at the level of reflexes. I call them healing reflexes, or healthy reflexes, and what they do is they are activated by changes in the function of your organs, whether it’s your heart, or your kidneys, or your intestines.”

It’s curious, really, that we all know it as “the vagus nerve” because you actually have two, and each one is made up of 100,000 fibers. In the same way that you have two thumbs, or two kidneys, each one sits on either side of your body, and across the total 200,000 nerves, they carry the crucial information that keeps you healthy. Impressive, and vital to our survival.

It’s so important, actually, that if you cut it on both sides, in the neck, it’s fatal. You die.

Dr Kevin J Tracey

“It’s so important, actually, that if you cut it on both sides, in the neck, it’s fatal. You die,” said Tracey. “It’s the only nerve in the body that, if you cut it on both sides, you die. That’s why Galen, sort of the world’s first scientist, called the vagus nerve ‘the great nerve’, and that name stood for centuries. I think it’s a better name, actually.”

The SetPoint System is an implantable neurostimulation device that aims to hack into the great nerve by stimulating it once daily. This then activates a series of pathways that are an innate part of our physiology as a means to control certain illnesses, and now it’s received FDA approval as a therapy for rheumatoid arthritis.

This debilitating chronic autoimmune disease affects over 1.5 million Americans. Characterized by the immune system attacking healthy tissue, it can cause joint pain, bone erosion, and significantly reduce mobility, and there is currently no cure.

The existing treatment options include biological and targeted synthetic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs, which some patients find hard to tolerate, and around 50 percent of patients discontinue their therapies within two years. SetPoint’s goal is to provide an alternative that can effectively manage autoimmune conditions without suppressing the immune system.

Its FDA approval follows a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled study that followed 242 patients. It showed that the therapy was well-tolerated with a low level of serious adverse events related to it (1.7 percent). It also provides a long-term solution for patients living with this chronic disease.

“The approval of the SetPoint System highlights the potential of neuroimmune modulation as a novel approach for autoimmune disease, by harnessing the body’s neural pathways to combat inflammation,” said the study’s principal investigator, Dr Mark Richardson, Director of Functional Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Neurosciences at Harvard Medical School, in a statement. “After implantation during a minimally invasive outpatient procedure, the SetPoint device is programmed to automatically administer therapy on a predetermined schedule for up to 10 years, simplifying care for people living with RA.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. iPad Air 5 might get close competition from Realme’s upcoming Android tablet
  2. Matillion raises $150M at a $1.5B valuation for its low-code approach to integrating disparate data sources
  3. Ultrasounds Show Unborn Fetuses Making Disgusted Faces When Mom Eats Kale
  4. Twitter Says It Is No Longer Stopping Any COVID-19 Misinformation

Source Link: First-Of-Its-Kind Vagus Nerve Implant Gets FDA Approval As A Therapy For Rheumatoid Arthritis

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Giant City-Swallowing Cracks In Earth’s Surface Are A “New Geo-Hydrological Hazard”
  • Three Incredible Telescopes Looked At The Butterfly Nebula To Learn Where Earth Came From
  • The Pacific Ocean Is So Vast It Contains Its Own Antipodes
  • World’s Tallest Bridge Over “Crack In The Earth” Gets Daunting Load Test By Fleet Of 96 Trucks
  • Mars’s Interior Still Has Evidence Of Ancient Impact, Dead NASA Mission Tells Us
  • A Soviet Physicist Once Survived A Proton Beam Through The Head – This Is How
  • Outstanding Photos Show First Baby Planet Growing In The Grooves Of A Stellar Disk
  • The “Plague Of Justinian” May Have Been The First Pandemic. DNA At A Mass Grave Has Finally Identified Its Cause.
  • Michelson And Morley’s “Failed” 1887 Experiment Changed The Course Of Physics, And Put The Aether To Bed
  • Only 19 US States Require School Sex Education To Be Medically Accurate, Finds Sweeping Review
  • Do Any Frogs Or Toads Give Birth To Live Young? Just One: Meet The Western Nimba Toad
  • Tasmanian Tigers’ Genetics May Have Doomed Them Long Before Humans Came Along
  • Scientists “Wake Up” Ancient Life That’s Been Under The Seabed For 100 Million Years
  • Measurable Brain Changes Following Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Identified For The First Time
  • “It Was Really Unexpected”: Scientists Stunned By Glowing Plants, And All It Takes Is An Injection
  • Scientists Created Gene-Edited Albino Cane Frogs To Unravel The Mysteries Of Natural Selection
  • In Vivo Vs In Vitro: What Do They Actually Mean?
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: What Will The Fossils Of The Future Look Like?
  • Finally, A Successful Starship Launch – What This Means For The Moon Landings
  • 26 Years After Launch, The ISS Will Try A New Way To Stay In Orbit Next Month
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version