Mechanomedicine.
Publication Year:
2026
PubMed ID:
41939855
Funding Grants:
Public Summary:
Mechanical forces play an important role in keeping our bodies healthy. From the movement of our organs and tissues to the behavior of individual cells, physical forces such as stretching, pressure, and stiffness help control how our bodies function. Changes in these forces can also be signs of injury or disease, offering new opportunities to detect health problems and develop better treatments. A growing field called mechanomedicine explores how the physical properties of our bodies can be used to diagnose, monitor, and treat diseases. For example, changes in tissue stiffness may help doctors identify diseases, while carefully controlled mechanical forces may encourage damaged tissues to heal and recover. In this review, we explain how mechanical forces affect the body, from large organs to individual cells and molecules. We discuss how researchers measure these forces and use this information to better understand health and disease. We also highlight emerging technologies that use mechanical signals to support tissue repair, improve rehabilitation, and develop new treatments. In cancer immunotherapy, controlling mechanical signals may also help improve the activation and function of immune cells, enabling them to recognize and attack cancer cells more effectively. Finally, we explore the challenges and future opportunities for bringing these approaches into everyday medical care. These include developing new materials and medical devices, improving methods for growing cells and miniature organs in the laboratory, establishing reliable ways to measure mechanical changes in the body, and using artificial intelligence to improve disease detection and treatment. Overall, mechanomedicine offers a promising new way to understand, diagnose, and treat diseases by taking advantage of the body's physical properties. By combining advances in biology, engineering, and medicine, this emerging field could help make healthcare more precise, effective, and personalized.
Scientific Abstract:
Mechanical forces act throughout the body across multiple scales, from organs and tissues to cells and molecules, playing a vital role in maintaining tissue integrity, regulating cellular functions and supporting physiological performance. Importantly, alterations in mechanical forces and properties can be hallmarks of tissue injury and disease, and can thus serve as valuable biomarkers for disease monitoring and diagnostics and can be harnessed to modulate biological processes for therapeutic benefit. This concept, termed mechanomedicine, offers an important strategy in disease diagnosis and therapy. In this Review, we first introduce biomechanics and mechanobiology as the underlying principles of mechanomedicine and outline the properties and measurements of key mechanical signatures in health and disease. We then explore the application of mechanomedicine across scales, from organ-level and tissue-level diagnostics to cellular and molecular mechanotherapeutics, including strategies for tissue regeneration and rehabilitation. Finally, we highlight challenges and opportunities in the clinical translation of mechanomedicine approaches, in particular with regards to the innovation of materials and devices, the manufacturing of cells and organoids, the definition and standardization of mechanical biomarkers, and the integration of artificial intelligence.