Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at ten am Eastern on Apple, Coarplay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
We do want to keep you updated on what's happening on the economic front end in Washington, DC, and for that we go to Michael McKee, international economics and.
Policy correspondent who's in DC.
And the IMF just released its lowered forecast for world growth this year and next, citing the risk of a global trade war, also saying, Mike, the possibility of recession in the US is rising to forty percent from twenty seven percent in October.
What else did we learn, well, Alex, the world economic outlook is rather cloudy. Indeed, according to the World Economic Outlook, basically, the IMF had to retool all of their forecasts that were underway when Donald Trump announced his tariffs on April second, and so since then they've come up with a couple of different scenarios because we don't know what exactly he's going to do.
But the one they're using is one they call the reference scenario, and it is that the global growth rate will fall by half a percentage point this year, but inflation won't rise as much because global slowdown will mean that price pressures ease a little bit. That's for the whole world. For the United States, it's much grimmer. We
will grow just one point five percent this year. That's almost a full percentage point less than had been forecast just two months ago by the IMF, and the inflation rate will rise to three percent as unemployment rises above four percent. So the US outlook is not particularly good at all of this they blame on tariffs.
So Mike, that's kind of where I wanted to go here. I mean, it does feel like a switch was thrown, you know, three months ago, where we were in a decent economic outlook GDP, you know, growing a three percent range on a real basis, inflation probably still a little higher than the Fed like it, but you know, two and a half percent, stock.
Market at all time high.
Is are they ascribing, as you mentioned, the majority or all of their cuts to this uncertainty surrounding tariffs.
Yes, and to modeling out the tariffs themselves and what impact they might have of course they have to just sort of pick a level of tariffs and try to come up with an estimate for what that might mean,
since we don't have those numbers. But basically they're working off what the administration had announced in early April, and it's just an across the board drop in economic activity, GDP, markets, everything, and of course, as you mentioned, they do put a lot of weight not just on the financial costs but on the costs of uncertainty.
Well, what areas through the IMF forecast or maybe the least affected by all of this.
Interestingly, of the major economies, Great Britain is the least effective. They don't see really any change in growth for the UK. They forecast one point seven percent, that's down just the tenth of a percent, and they don't see any change in the UK inflation three point one percent or unemployment four and a half percent, largely because the jump administration didn't really put much in terms of tariffs on the UK, just the ten percent universal tariffs, so they got off
a little bit easier than other countries. The Eurozone sees a decline in growth of half a percent to just seven tenths of a percent this year.
Hey, Mike did.
Does the IMF a pine at all on the duration of tariffs? A lot of folks are saying, hey, if you know President Trump backs off or waters down some of these tariffs like he oftentimes does when push comes to show where he that delays them that maybe the impact won't be as bad.
Can you I MUS even model that out?
Well, they try in the sense that they're doing a couple of different scenarios and they do a lighter tear regime and so, which would mean that the impacts are lower. There's still an impact, but they're lower than the reference forecast. But they make no predictions about how likely any of these are going to be.
When we take a look at other areas of the global economy, what don't I m F say on China?
That's really interesting, Alex because the Chinese take a big hit growth of just three point two percent, down one point three percent from their January forecast. That would be the lowest growth rate in China in decades. The Chinese government is aiming at five percent this year, so it could be a big hit to the Chinese. In terms of inflation, they think.
They'll be flat.
That's maybe the best case scenario for China. In this situation, a lot of people think they would experience disinflation, if not deflation.
Mike, We're going to get some economic data this week initial Joba's claims. I mean, what's the what are you looking at this week to try to see those initial signs of economic impact in what we like to call the hard data.
Well, you'd be looking at things like jobless claims, which haven't moved at all. They've actually come down some, so it doesn't look like companies are letting people go. But this is a kind of a different scenario because we're in an environment coming out of the pandemic where companies couldn't find workers, so they are more reluctant to let people go, more reluctant to adjust in the face of a potential recession than they might have been in the past.
Next week we'll get the the March jobs report and the April jobs report rather, and that will give us some indication in the unemployment and labor force numbers of what's going on. If immigration, illegal or otherwise has basically fallen to zero, the labor force won't grow, it should probably shrink, and so that's something to keep an eye on as well.
As well.
All right, Mike, super appreciated.
Down and you see there, Michael McKee, Boomerg International Economics and Policy corresponding.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at ten am Eastern on Apple Corplay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
Ox Steele, Paul Sweeney.
We're live here at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
That's NJ. It to the cool kids. I'm gonna stop at the store and get some swag. I thic.
Okay, the whole team.
Oh no, I think I'm just me and maybe a sticker for the car carsh man.
Yeah, we're hearing New New Jersey and some smart people here doing some really smart research.
And we have one of the.
Next will be study Distinguished Professor Chemistry and Environmental Science here and j T. When we talk to us about what you're working on in terms of your research here, I see the Biosmart Center.
That sounds pretty cool. What are you guys doing at the bio Smart Center.
Thank you so much for having me at the Biosmass Center. Our goal is to look for sustainable materials in terms of chemistry to create technologies.
That will help people.
One of us technologies actually, you know, to detect pain.
Over one hundred US adults live.
With chronic pain and more than ten million individuals struggle with prescription medications. But every time you go to the hospital and the clinicians, physicians are required to measure pain. And the only way we do that, despite advancement, is to show you a facial scale.
They wear on the scale like what phases are you right now?
Exact?
So what would your research be able to do?
So basically my research days, pain is biochemical in nature, and when you have chronic pain, there's a lot of inflammation. And when there's inflammation, there are chemicals that are about chemicals that are produced by the body. By measuring be faust of all, By knowing those biochemicals and measuring how much they are, we can relate this to pain that
people are feeling. And so you won't need this subjective approach to measure pain because if you have infants, for example, if you have elderly, if you have people who are conscious, they're not able to articulate their pain, and so you can actually use about sensors a smart biosensors to give you the level of pain that people are going through.
So where are you in terms of your research.
Our sensors that have been used currently?
Uh, you know, you know, we have collaborators in Upside New York and they take human blood samples and they measure the levels of molecules called cyclopgen is two or inducible nitros oxide tastes, and.
They measure the level.
We combine this with artificial intelligence to be able to give you the amount of pain that people are going through. And for the most part, we've been able to link the level that people suggest to the level that we're measuring from our bios.
Are How far are we from like regular doctors and nurses using it in hospitals currently?
I mean it's we've looked at close to one thousand in the doors and we're getting eighty percent accuracy in terms of what people tell you. At the end of the day, pain is also individualistic, right, There are aspects of pain that you know, you know, it depends on individuals.
You have pay tolerants, right exactly.
You know you have you know, you have saturation, you can so there are so many other components that will impacted. But in terms of being able to actually test this out, we're doing this already.
So how does doing research at a place like njai T How does that work? How do you balance like I guess, research with teaching and all that, because I know most professors have to deal with that across various disciplines.
In actual fact, there's correlation because in the classroom I teach graduate students, I teach them the fundamentals, and then we take it further from the classroom and actually do this in the lab, and so there is a connection between what you do in the classroom, what you're teaching the classroom, and what you actually doing your love.
We talk a lot on Bloomberg here about tariff risks, but economic risks.
About products being in short supply.
Is any of that relevant to the work that you do, Like, are you worried about getting certain materials or products to fund.
And continue moving your research along?
Suddenly we're going to be affected because, as you know, most research at the moment are funded by the federal government, and so if there's less funding, there's less time that we will not be able to support students to be able to do the work, and so ultimately it will impact our research, It would impact the classroom and what we do.
What's the next step for you in your research?
Are you?
Are you working with a team other professors, maybe other universities.
What's your team looks like my.
Team at at the moment, we have six PhD students, we have post dogs, we have clinicians that I'm working with, those who have computer scientists who are looking at the AI component of our work. So it's a whole center activity.
How did you come to research this particular part. I always find that really fascinating when you like narrow it down, like the field must be so broad, right, Like why measuring pain?
That's a very good I'm sorry, that's a very good question because I have always developed sensors for different things. We developed sensors for the environment, We developed sensors to measure different things. But I had a friend whose daughter was suffering from sickle cell and you know, and she asks, you know a view.
You know, many times she's in crisis.
Physicians that tificately they cannot really assess whether or not she's in pain. And I thought, well, that should be easy as long as we can find a particular molecule, we can measure that.
And I thought somebody should have done that.
It seems so obvious now I'm getting But we did.
We looked in literature and we realize it's actually not. And this is where we started the work fifteen years ago.
And our doctor's clinicians in the marketplace, are they receptive to your research and in what you're in your products?
Clinicians are receptive.
But my own daughter is not a sociologist.
She's a physician and she's at Opkins, and she says, Mommy, if we can find an instrument that would tell us how much pain people are in, this is going to be significant because we get people, a lot of people coming, they say they're in pain.
We're required to treat the pain.
But how can we actually assess how much pain they're in? So if somebody says some ten out of ten, who are you to say they're not?
Right?
Yep?
Interesting, well, really great stuff. Congratulations on all of it. We wish you a lot of luck. It seems like an amazing, amazing research that you guys wind up doing here.
Thank you so very much.
That is a professor Wami joining us a NJ T Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Science, on measuring pain.
I never thought about it. I thought it was again just.
A little But the inflammation thing, that's so key. I feel like everything wrong with us is inflammation.
Really, she's nodding.
Then I said that, so therefore it must be real exactly.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at ten am Eastern on Apple, Coarplay, and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
All right, let's talk to our next guest here, Tara Alvarez, nj T Distinguished Professor Biomedical Engineering, talking about treating vision disorders. I've had a vision disorder since sixth grade. I've had glasses.
So is that a vision disorders?
Is just I don't know, maybe it's just bad eyes.
That is there a distinction?
I don't here's a distinction.
Tarah, thank you so much for joining us here at nj T your home. Talk to us about the work you're doing. What are you looking at? What's the vision disorders that you guys are looking at.
Thanks so much for having me, and you're right glasses is what most people think of when they think about an eye disorder, and if you can imagine, it's very difficult to know what clear vision looks like unless you've been fitted for your first pair of glasses. My expertise is in how the brain brings visual information into the brain, which is the idea of using the eyes as a
team to get the information into the brain. And if you don't do that well, you might not even realize you have it, but it can result in problems when doing near work such as reading, working on your phone, working on computers, and vision therapy works quite well for this condition known as convergence insufficiency, which is the inability of the eyes to work well as a team.
How do you have how do you fix that? I guess or how do you find it?
And then how do you fix it?
Great questions. So vision therapy, which is basically like a form of physical or occupational therapy for your eyes, strengthens the eye muscles and the communication between the brain and the eyes. My work has been funded mostly through the National Institutes of Health, which is very critical in funding
research that has direct impact to our society. You can find this by going to an eye doctor, so an optometrist or an ophthalmologist, and they can do an exam, but most people don't even know that they have it, so they don't even realize that this is a problem. So typical problems people can have as they get headaches while reading, they feel like they read slowly, they get blurry vision, double vision, and it takes them much longer.
So it's not that they have a cognitive or a problem in learning, it's that they're struggling to get the visual information into the brain.
How common is this affliction or this issue.
So depending on how you do, the diagnosis is present in between four and twelve percent, so you can say roughly eight percent of the population.
You mentioned the funding. What's your level of confidence that funding for this kind of study will stay.
I'm unclear right now. So right now we have I'm on my second randomized clinical trial where we're concentrating on concussions because we have the CDC released in December of twenty four that concussion costs is about forty billion dollars a year. And if you have had a concussion, especially multiple concussions, you can develop persistent postconcussive symptoms and out of that population, about half of them have this convergence and sufficiency, which is that teeming problem of the eyes.
So it is quite common. It's very impactful. My program officer at the National Eye Institute within the National Institutes of Health is extremely excited about our work, and in the past administration, I would have much more confidence that we would have funding to continue. That is very important work, but it is something I have a lot of concerns about right now.
How often do you get funded or how often do most researchers get fund Is this an annual thing?
So typically you get what's called an R one, which is five years of funding, and you are reviewed every year, okay, and typically with a randomized clinical trial, which is what I'm leading. That's done in collaboration with Children's Hospital Philadelphia as well as Rutgers chop Yes and Rutgers University. It takes time because this is a rehabilitation and it's a longitudinal study, and it's also done with Saless University of Drexel, so it's not something that happens overnight. It takes time
to acquire this data. But it's really critical because the knowledge that I'm gaining from this study has been patented where NNGIT holds the patents, and that led to our startup company, Ocular Motor Technologies. And the key reason I became a biomedical engineer is I want to have a positive impact on others, specifically in the healthcare sector. And it's my children that actually inspired the core technology of our company, which is the idea of trying to do
the therapy that works very well but is incredibly boring. So if you can put the therapy in a virtual reality headset and make it into a game. If you have a child, a mine or almost all grown now, but it's not difficult to get a kid to play a VR game. And in essence, we are sugar coating the therapy and they think they're having fun, but in actuality it's sugar coating a ton of science to get those eyes to work better together.
It's like when I put kale in the oven.
Correct.
Yeah, it's a lot of the sad lines exactly. So what is the exit strategy for the startup and can you get outside funding at the same time.
So we have been funded through the NSF through SBIR, which is the small Bestiness Investigator grants. We've had both phase one and phase two, and we also participated in an NNGIT iCore program, and we did a national version of iCore, which is basically teaching professors how to create and translate their science out of the lab and to have a positive impact.
Amazing.
We have to leave it there. I'm sorry, we're up against the clock. Listen, don't leave me yet quite yet. Thank you so much. We really appreciate Tara Tara Alvarez NJIT Distinguished Professor Biomedical Engineering joining us here at NJIT. I love hearing about all the variety of work. It is truly truly amazing.
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Right now, when we get back to some of our speakers here at NJIT, Chow Yohon and J T alumnus and he's co foundered CEO Princeton New Energy, which is a global leader in lithium ion battery direct recycling. I know that's what I learned from my he's now twenty nine year old engineer son back when he's like twelve. He explained to me these lithum ion batteries that we're powering his little remale control cars, how serious you have
to handle them? You can't just throw them away. And here's twelve and he's schooling me there, So I know this thing. Child talked to us about your company. What are you guys trying to do here? Because these batteries are everywhere now.
Yeah, So Princeton New Energy, we have a great technology in the use in plasma to recycle lithim ion battery is much lower cost roughly forty to fifty percent lower than the traditional recycling technology and also much more cleaner compared with the traditional lead as the leaching process. So that's why recycling technology we need in the US is a cleaner and a cheaper So talk about the supply chain for the battery. The biggest a problem for the US right now is that the is still too expensive.
So how we can reduce the cost for the EV is important. So there's a more than half of the costs inside the battery, which is a they call the cathode active materials. So the direct recycling our technology is to direct extract those cathode active materials outside from the old batteries that you can reuse. And at the same time, we do not want to produce a lot of waste.
So in the traditional way using the software acid, you're leaching all the metals and know at the end you get a lot of sodium software and we don't have the place to dumb them right now, So that's why we need great technology to do that and which is a much lower cost. So that's what we're doing.
So let's go to the cathode part first.
So you're doing that forty percent cheaper than competitors how so, Yeah.
Because of the traditional way, you need to break the old batteries to down to the element. So using the acid, so we don't destroy the cathode materials which is a fix them reuse them. So that's how we reduce the cost and using our plasma technology.
So where are we with just battery technology and recycling, I mean, are there more advances to go here?
Because it feels like.
That's such a key part of electric vehicles, just electric power going forward.
Yeah, so it's not only for the EVA, but also like the Andy storage batteries. Yes, as the big the storage system, so traditional technology we're twined to build in the US, but it's very expensive and the processing costs is also very expensive. So that's why in the US we're trying to scaleing up our technology. So the company was founded in twenty nineteen and we have technology and after that we have the large space lab in New
Jersey which is a close to Princeton. And also we have a build up pilot production line which is about three four years ago right now it is upruning about two years which is in Dallas, Texas, and starting from last year, we are building the first commercial scale of the production line in South Kara and Chester County. So in this one we are able to recycle five thousand towns as a face one and we target to expand to thirty thousand towns end to recycle the batteries.
Do you have to have end buyers that will contract that material for you to feel confident putting in that kind of capex.
Yes, we need that and do you have that? We do have the feed stock provider which give us the waste batteries and it were coming from like a cell manufacturers who make the batteries. They are manufacturing scrap, so we do have a contract with them to recycle their manufacturing scrap. We do have a contract with auto ems and also the Junkyard players who have a lot of waste batteries, so we also have a contract for that.
One who's buying them though, so.
Currently we are selling to the leaching companies who need those batteries to continue to get medals for the later usage.
How are you funding your company? I'm a former banker, so I always think about the money. How are you funding this company?
That's a very important part. So we close the two rounds of the investment. We got CIZ round and a RAND. So we have a private investors who interest with US investor US and supporting us, and those the investors some of the finishing investors AMOWT Strategy Investor so. And on top of this, we get a big support from the Department Energy in the past six years, starting from like a smaller grand SBR later on we have a larger grant, so we got rough about twenty million dollars pouring us.
Well, what is your level of confidence that that continues.
I think for the United States, critical minerals are very important, So we don't have so many minds in the US. What we need is how we can leverage those waste stuff and how to reuse them. So that's why I think recycling technology is a critical for US to secure the critical minerals and will link to the US energy security. So I think for our technology is very critical for the United States for the materials what we need and
also for the batteries what we're going to build. So that's what we need, and just give you a little bit numbers. So currently US don't produce any catle the materials, so all the materials we import from outside. So directly cycling we use the waste batteries and produce the catle the materials to make new batteries. And that's content more than half of the value inside the little IONN batteries.
So how important is That's why we believe the grant will continue to support this critical minerals research and also the support our energy security.
So you get your masters and your PhD here.
Right, that's right in chemistry department.
That sounds fun. How was your experience here?
It's awesome. I really enjoyed the research here. So basically it's my very strong the research and the Engineering foundation. So I think that's would be very critical because once you're move into the next step, so doing research basically finished PC, no one's going to teach you how to
do it. You have very strong the experience, how to design your research, how to set up everything, and then after research, how to write a paper and the publications and more important, how to find the research topics, write the proposals to get a grant. So yeah, we got I got a pretty good foundation here.
Very good good advertisement for walking advertisement.
Or Ji t for sure.
Chalian, co founder and CEO Princeton New Energy talking about recycling those batteries which are in the cars and a lot of other places too.
That's really amazing.
I'm just interested to see and we've heard from many professors here as well, obviously with the startup about funding and how important government funding is and how uncertain that path to government funding is as well.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at ten am Eastern on Apple, Cocklay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts, or watch us live on YouTube.
I'le steal here alongside Paul Sweeney. This is Bloomberg Intelligence.
Radio Broadcasting two live from Newark, New Jersey at JIT New Jersey Institute of Technology, where they envroll thirteen thousand students and are really some of the leaders in technology and science within the country. Joining us now here is Eric Fortune and JIT Associate Professor of Biological Sciences.
He recently led this really cool. He recently led.
A team competing to record the biodiversity in a square kilometer of the Amazon rainforest.
And this is after six year completion.
Your team walked away with a five million dollars prize. This is really exciting. Can you walk us through what that was like and how you did it and all that fun stuff.
Well, it's a super exciting project that we were part of. It was sponsored by this group called the X Prize, and their goal is to incentivize fields where otherwise there weren't sufficient finances to drive things. So they feel like they're responsible for the current space exploration that's occurring in the private sector because they sponsored an X Prize thirty years ago that drove that market. So their goal with this X Prize was to drive the same kind of
development and innovation in the area of biodiversity. So their rules were that they would give us a few months ahead of time, a random location in some rainforest on the planet, give us one day to sample with only drones and other kinds of remote sensing technologies. No human was allowed to go into this square kilometer, and then forty eight hours to analyze the data and provide a report about the biodiversity that we encountered in that time.
What did you find here? Findings?
What was the bio I can't think of a more biodiverse area maybe than a rainforest.
Well, we went to perhaps the most biodiverse place on Earth.
So this was a habitat in the Amazon rainforest. And so we had a square kilometer just outside of Manaos in Brazil, and so we deployed our drones and these devices that sat on top of the rainforest canopy, and they collected insects and sound and environmental DNA, and we were able to take like twenty seven million samples of genetic information from the forest, identified more species of birds that exist in all of North America in this one
one kilometer area, and then measure hundreds of thousands of insects all in this twenty four hour period.
It's really unprecedented.
So okay, so you take this, you analyze that you have a tremendous amount of research.
Then what then what?
Well, that's the I think the big problem that Xprise is trying to identify, which is first to develop the technology so that we can do this kind of analysis and then the next steps. The part that we're in now is to try and develop and address the market for biodiversity monitoring not only in rainforest and critically important habitats like the Amazon Basin, but across the planet.
So what are the next technological frontiers for monitoring?
So we've now developed and tested and proven these technologies, so our goal now is to translate these things into businesses. So our team alone has generated six or seven new businesses that are each focusing on components of this biodiversity monitoring that are entering the market at this moment. And the other teams that we compete it with, some of their teams are also generating these new companies. New companies that do things like monitoring environmental DNA at.
A particular location.
So if you're building a power plant somewhere along an endangered forest, you want to know what your impacts are you measured the environmental DNA to know what species were there before and what species what your impact is on species later.
It's great that we're having this on Earth Day, do you know?
I know it's cool, but I was kind of joking, not joking with some of my producers, being like.
Do we still care about that?
As in like, was this research much more relevant in certain areas two years ago than you could make an argument.
That is now?
Well, I don't think so. I mean, in one sense, Earth Day is the greatest disappointment ever right in that and also kind of a weird thing to say. Every day we live on Earth as far as I can tell, and so what kind of action can we generate here? So obviously the most important thing is to align market interests along with saving and preserving biodiversity. And lots of companies rely on services provided by nature, and so those companies have already recognized that and already are engaged in
saving the habitats on which they rely on. A great example is Laureal. This is a company that has a global mission for making sure that the impacts of the products they generate are going to be neutral over the entire lifespan of the product from production to use and then the discarding of the waste afterwards.
Do you sense changing winds out there in terms of funding, terms of support for biodiversity and just environment in general.
Well, I mean it's complicated, of course, with changing political winds, but we all live on this planet and that's not changing. And I think anyone of our age and I don't mean to say anything about how old any of us are, but it's inescapable that during your lifetime you have observed changes in climate and in biodiversity. That occurs, and whether we like it or not, this is something that we're
going to have to deal with. The question I think from a business perspective, of course, is what's the time horizon of that? Is it one year, ten years, one hundred years? And that's a complicated thing that I am not equipped to answer.
What's next for you guys?
So I'm personally. I've started a company that came out of this Xprize competition and so we have our first order, and so I'm busy building things, building these high tech devices that are deployable into these kinds of habitats that collect this kind of data. And we see that is at least on a small scale, a sustainable business for
quite quite some time. Anyone who owns land and is interested in in the biodiversity there starting with like national parks or local and city parks, or any other business that have large landing holdings, they're going to need over time devices like this to answer regulatory and their customers demands about biodiversity.
And fascinating stuff. Eric, thank you so much for joining us.
Eric Fortune, here's a social professor of biological sciences here at nj IT here in Newark, New Jerseys.
We appreciate getting a few minutes of his time.
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All right, al steal Paul Sweeting.
We're live at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and JIIT in Newark, New Jersey, talking to some really smart people.
What are you doing here? I mean this one we saved.
Somebody actually does this A neural engineer and brain stimulation scientist.
That is awesome. Put that on a business card.
Alisa Kalioniami, Assistant Professor Biomedical Engineering here at NJIT joins us here. Alisa, what are you guys looking at? What's your research you focusing on these days?
Yeah, so the biggest question my research is trying to understand how to modulate the brain safely and precisely. So we already know that several brain disorders have like abnormal brain activities, but we don't know what causes them and kind of like how can we normalize them? And that's where brain stimulation comes from. So prain stimulation is a method where we can actually modulate the brain safely.
Modulate the brain does that mean like fix it or change the brain waves or what does that mean?
So basically it's kind of like the radio. So like with the radio, you can find two things. So with this one, we are applying these like small energy pulses to the brain that are totally safe and these energy pulses are able to change your brain activity.
Wow.
So give us like a typical example of kind of what you're trying to do a patient who may have some brain issues.
What's an example?
Yeah, So, well, for example, considering medications, So medications are life saving for many individuals. But the challenge is that like some people get side effects, some people don't just like tolerate them. Some people just don't get like any response, and obviously that's a problem because then we don't have any treatments for those. So what I'm trying to do with my research is kind of like help those individuals
who don't get help from the pharmaceuticals. So with these brain simulation methods, we kind of like fill that gap and try to help them. So we try to develop methods that we could kind of like whatever problem they have in their brain, we could elevate their symptoms, and then in that case it's sort of customized per person to do that.
So I mean, that's amazing. That's like a life saving thing. You say it's totally safe, but you say electric magneta.
Pulsis in your brain, and you're like, WHOA, I don't know, that sounds scary.
Give me the pitch for why it's safe.
So so basically with uh, this these path is we can just reach the surface of the brain and then like your brain is already naturally electrical, So what we're basically doing is that we just like initiate the activity that you would be initiating yourself as well, but we just do it externally and then whatever was supposed to happen in your brain will happen. So it's kind of like we just initiate the domino effects, so to speak.
Where are you in your research now in terms of maybe getting at some point two practical applications.
So my LAP is rather new, So I've been an hit only like two and a half years, so I would say that we're still at the kind of like the first steps. But we already have some industry collaborations. So we've worked with So there's a for example, this program and SFI coores so that that's a program where we collaborate with industry and then kind of like a try to kind of like get an idea of where
we could help with our research. So I've had a couple of student teams done that and then but basically, like everything that we do, the end goal is to help patients, so somehow, because I mean, this is electricity, so obviously like that's where the engineering comes from. But like in addition, obviously we have to understand other feels like neuroscience and clinical things. But like from my labs, perspective.
You're trying to kind of like provide the engineering perspective, So what do you need to do or what can we do through an engineer's perspective to to model like kind of like improve these methods so this.
Could become you could commercialize what you're doing.
So this technology is already commercialized. Okay, So basically this was invented about thirty years ago. So there are several companies. I believe currently there is like thirteen different companies that are developing these these methods and there are FDA approved treatments. So why we still need like a research is because like we have this problem that like a we know that this works, but we don't really understand the interaction
between the brain and the electricity that well. So okay, we know that it works in this one individual, but then like how do we modify to the second individual?
That's the mystery.
So we're trying to kind of like find find out that what is the like what do we have to do, like what do you have to change?
So currently is FDA.
Approved the things like depression OCDS, so obsessive compulsive disorder and microants with ours, but everything's like one size with all.
So if you have like.
Let's say, like a your your tenetic somehow different, it is like it might not work for you, but then.
Currently we don't really know why and what should we do?
Interesting? Are you saying that? Interesting?
That re research there for sure, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us A Lisa Kelli and Niam Assistant Professor Biomedical Engineering n JIT got some smart folks here and we're glad they could spare a few minutes of their time here today.
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