Most pills deliver medicine. The next generation could turn a dose into a diagnosis.
Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Khalil Ramadi is developing swallowable devices that could detect disease less invasively, tailor treatments more precisely, and reach parts of the body that medicine has struggled to access.
To Ramadi, the human nervous system resembles a telecommunications network. Nerves carry signals between the brain and almost every organ, yet medicine has only begun to understand how to use this infrastructure.
For much of the past century, physicians have treated the body principally as a chemical system: measuring compounds in the blood and prescribing drugs designed to alter their behavior. Ramadi believes the next chapter of medicine may also involve communicating through electricity.
“In the future, a drug may not necessarily be a chemical compound,” he says. “It could be an electrical signal delivered at the right location, at the right intensity, and at the right time.”
At NYU Abu Dhabi’s Laboratory for Advanced Neuroengineering and Translational Medicine, Ramadi and his collaborators are exploring what that could look like. Their work includes wireless capsules that deliver light to neurons in the gastrointestinal tract, and ingestible devices designed to sample the gut’s microbiome.
Beginning with the clinical problem
Ramadi’s approach was shaped by a doctoral program at MIT and Harvard Medical School that combined engineering education with medical training. He studied alongside medical students and completed clinical rotations, moving between laboratories and hospital wards.
That experience taught him to start with the clinical problem, rather than the technology.
He began his research career studying the brain, where reaching neural tissue generally requires invasive surgery. During his postdoctoral training, he started looking beyond the brain and spinal cord to the nerves that connect the body’s organs. The gastrointestinal tract became a particular focus.
The gut contains the body’s largest collection of neurons outside the brain. Its enteric nervous system senses food, coordinates digestion, and regulates nutrient absorption with striking autonomy. Often called the body’s “little brain,” it also offered Ramadi a promising avenue for exploring less invasive ways to interact with the nervous system.
“People already swallow pills every day,” Ramadi says. “You can imagine adding new functions to them.”
That idea became a natural fit for his research. Swallowable devices can travel through the gastrointestinal tract and exit naturally, giving researchers a way to reach and study parts of the body that are difficult to access by conventional means.
Illuminating the gut’s nervous system
One strand of Ramadi’s research uses optogenetics, a technique that makes selected neurons responsive to light. The method has enabled researchers to study specific groups of brain cells with greater precision, but the gut’s nervous system remains far less understood, despite its influence on appetite, digestion, and metabolism.
To study these neurons without surgically implanted optical fibers, Ramadi’s team developed ICOPS (Ingestible Controlled Optogenetic Stimulation). The battery-free capsule contains a miniature light source that can activate light-sensitive gut neurons from inside the gastrointestinal tract.
Wirelessly powered and 3D-printed in-house, the capsule lets researchers activate gut neurons while animals move freely, enabling them to study neural activity alongside natural behaviors such as eating and digestion.
By revealing the roles of specific gut neurons, ICOPS could eventually support new therapies based on targeted electrical signals, alongside medication and surgery.
Ramadi is also interested in what conventional tests miss. Most microbiome research relies on stool samples, which reveal little about bacterial communities further upstream in the gut. Yet the small intestine is where much nutrient absorption occurs, and many oral medicines enter the bloodstream.
His team developed CORAL, a passive ingestible capsule inspired by the structure of coral reefs, to collect bacteria as it passes through the small intestine.
Together, these projects reflect a common goal: finding new ways to access, measure, and interact with parts of the body that are difficult to study from the outside.
Learning to speak to the body
For Ramadi, the potential of ingestible technology lies not simply in making medicine less invasive, but in providing access to signals and environments that conventional approaches may miss.
Future devices could reveal microbial communities that are difficult to sample, help guide medicine selection, or stimulate neural pathways without requiring a permanent implant. They could also monitor several chemical and electrical signals at once, creating a richer picture of what is happening inside the body.
Ramadi sees practical applications and fundamental discovery as closely connected. A clinical problem can lead engineers toward new tools, while those tools can expose scientific questions that were previously impossible to investigate.
I am a strong believer in beginning with a problem and following where it leads,” Ramadi says. “Research develops like a tree: the initial problem forms the trunk, while new questions and discoveries emerge as branches that become more detailed over time.”
