Ni-Ka Ford is a medical and biological illustrator that works with both 2D and 3D sketches often in the neurotech space. Top 3 Takeaways: "I was doing an illustration for a procedure. And what happened was the surgeon actually ended up changing his manuscript after seeing my illustration." There are 4 accredited graduate programs for Medical Illustration "When I do something that's more a schematic, I could finish an illustration in maybe a week. More rendered illustrations that are high in deta...
Nov 15, 2021•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Paul Tubig and Dr Darcy McCusker are graduates from the University of Washington. Dr Tubig now works at at Georgia Southern University teaching neuroethics and is teaching social and political philosophy, bioethics, neuroethics, and philosophy of disability. Top 3 Takeaways: "There have been reports and testimonies of users who have experienced a sense of depersonalization, a sense of alienation and a sense that they are no longer themselves [after using implanted neurotechnology]." "It turns...
Nov 08, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Seth Hays 's research focus at the University of Texas at Dallas is enhancing neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to change, in order to treat neurological disease. The majority of current studies evaluate the ability of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), a putative targeted plasticity therapy, to improve recovery in models of motor dysfunction Top 3 Takeaways: "VNS itself is not a thing unto itself. It's really the combination of VNS with the rehabilitation that's producing the effects tha...
Nov 01, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Francois Ladouceur is a University of New South Wales professor teaching and researching integrated optics, silica and diamond-based photonics, optical sensing networks, and photonics-based brain/machine interfaces Top 3 Takeaways: "it's a liquid crystal-based transducer that can transduce an electrical signal into an optical signal that we can carry the away from the place of measurement" With electrical-based electrodes making the devices smaller increases the impedance degrading the signal wh...
Oct 25, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sergey Young is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of at least one billion people. To do that, Sergey founded Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all Top 3 Takeaways: "I'm sponsoring the development of age reversal X price. This is a technological competition to basically reverse aging measured by a set of biomarkers." "Some of the companies that we have in our...
Oct 18, 2021•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Although the Nicolelis Laboratory is best known for pioneering studies in neuronal population coding, Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMI) and neuroprosthetics in human patients and non-human primates, they have also developed an integrative approach to studying neurological and psychiatric disorders including Parkinsons disease and epilepsy. Top 3 Takeaways: "Every Brazilian kid dreams to play for the Brazilian national team in a world cup game, I didn't quite fulfill the dream, but I got as close as...
Oct 11, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Ludwig leads the Bioelectronic Medicines Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin , with the goal of developing next-generation neuromodulation therapies that use minimally invasive strategies to highjack the nervous system to treat circuit dysfunction and deliver biomolecules to target areas with unprecedented precision. Prior to Wisconsin, Dr. Ludwig served as the Program Director for Neural Engineering at the National Institutes of Health. He co-led the Translational Devices Program at N...
Oct 04, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Justin Sanchez is a Life Sciences Research Technical Fellow at Battelle but before that he was Director of Biological Technologies office at DARPA. Top 3 Takeaways "You'll never be able to establish your academic career unless you go and move to another place. I'm like, guys, this doesn't make any sense to me. What's most important is to do great work in the field and establish a foundation of the field." "I still had my university job for a couple of years while I was serving at DARPA. And i...
Sep 27, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Victor Pikov is the founder and CEO of Medipace , a sacral nerve stimulation neuromodulation company and VP of Technology at TRI, Trans Stimulation Incorporated. He also worked at Galvani, a joint venture between Google and GSK as well as working in academia before. Top 3 Takeaways "When you try to speak to potential investors who consider themselves experts in medical devices, they typically fall into three categories: One is no experience with neuromodulation and another bucket is experienc...
Sep 20, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Daniel Palanker is Professor of Opthamology at Stanford University. He has had many successful technologies spun off into companies or patents including those involving retinal prosthetics, optical imaging and spectroscopy, laser-tissue interactions, and retinal plasticity. Top 3 Takeaways "The [size] limitation for a retinal prosthesis is not in a fabrication side. The limitation is an interface with neurons" Allergan acquired Oculeve but then didn't do much with it seemingly because they al...
Sep 13, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Donna Hamlin is a corporate executive with thirty years of corporate, governance and strategy consulting experience. She oversees BoardWise ’s global programs, including its centers and their services. These include: board evaluations, professional certification and training, its global registry of qualified directors, Board Bona Fide®, its strategic partnership programs and its Boardwise center. Top 3 Takeaways "It's really important to know that if we want to be good at our work, then we'v...
Sep 06, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast David McMullen is the program officer at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They are launching the NIH Blueprint Medtech (links below) which aims to help incubate growing neurotech companies go from Bench to Bedside. Top 3 Takeaways "We're funding individual projects and trying to help groups in the past have struggled... to get funding and to get all the way to in human trials. The Blueprint Medtech resource is meant to derisk later invest...
Aug 30, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jon is the founder of Greenlight Guru (quality management software exclusively for medical device companies) & a medical device guru with nearly 20 years industry experience. Jon knows the best medical device companies in the world use quality as an accelerator. That's why he created Greenlight Guru to help companies move beyond compliance to True Quality. Top 3 Takeaways If it isn't documented, it didn't happen. One particular audit didn't take four days. It took two days because the Greenlight...
Aug 23, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Aldo Faisal is the Professor of AI & Neuroscience at the Dept. of Computing and the Dept. of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. His work is in Machine Learning and eye tracking to improve neurotechnologies. Top 3 Takeaways "What we do is we get people to move into our living lab/studio flat and they live their daily lives, and we record everything that they do, how they do, where they look, we record the eye movements, the body movements, and everything." "The more subjects you...
Aug 09, 2021•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Florian Solzbacher is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Blackrock Neurotech which has the Utah Electrode Array, the only FDA-approved neural implantable device. Blackrock Neurotech recently closed a $10 million financing round, led by Christian Angermayer's re.Mind Capital with participation from Peter Thiel, German entrepreneur Tim Sievers, and Sorenson Impact's University Venture Fund II. Top 3 Takeaways "In the end, you have to have the drive. It has to be a passion. And then you will find a ...
Aug 02, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thomas Oxley is a neurosurgeon who is also the founder of Synchron which makes the Stentrode . Instead of requiring invasive brain surgery for implantable neural devices, they are able to use stents such as those used in cardiology to collect neural signals Top 3 Takeaways: Stentrode implantation it's one of the simplest stent procedures. Got a $40 million Series B funding round from Khosla Ventures thanks to the success of in-human studies as well as the potential to piggyback off of existing h...
Jul 26, 2021•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Giovanni Lauricella is a Vice President of the Mullings Group which is a Medical Device Technology recruitment firm. He helps startups in the neurotech space find talented people from the most experienced down to the entry-level positions. Top 3 Takeaways: "Always pull on your network, always pull on that trust factor because people go to work for people. That's what they do, especially in startups and especially really early-stage startups" "If you want to be headhunted, make yourself available...
Jul 19, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kunal Ghosh is the founder and CEO of Inscopix which uses imaging tools to understand the brain in both health and disease. Top Three Takeaways: Miniscopes were invented out of a need for tools that have the ability to monitor and record large-scale neural circuit activity Imaging tools have the advantage of scale, single-cell resolution, longitudinal recording capabilities, and labelling for specific cell types Inscopix technology has enabled over 150 scientific papers 0:45 "Do you wanna introd...
Jul 05, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ulrich Hofmann is a Professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany working on some of the cutting edge and newest things in the field of neurotechnology. Top Three Takeaways The 8 micron limit for not causing a foreign body response might actually be closer to 1 micron Magnetoelectric nanoparticles might be the solution towards getting to the dream of having a 0 dimensional neural probe Neural Implants seem to activate those genes found in brain tumors 3:00 "You're working in Freiburg, which...
Jun 28, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Blythe Karow is a medical device veteran who is now the cofounder and CEO of Evren Technologies , a medical device company making a wearable Vagus Nerve Stimulator to help with the problems brought about by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Top 3 Takeaways Not only veterans but first responders often get PTSD and 1/9 women will have it at some point in their lives Stimulating the auricular (ear) branch of the Vagus nerve has fewer side effects but with a calming effect on the body Diagnosin...
Jun 21, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nicolas Vachicouras is the cofounder of Neurosoft Bioelectronics which is focusing on utilizing a novel soft electrode material in neural implants. The company comes out of Switzerland and has partnerships with the Stephanie Lacour lab and the Wyss Center 1:45 "Do you want to talk a little bit about yourself and your work and Neurosoft?" 4:30 "What's the benefit of soft versus hard implant?" 7:00 "Is the foreign body response, something that happens in ECOG as well, does the body react poorly to...
Jun 14, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anish Kaushal is an analyst at Amplitude VC which is looking at investing in neurotech companies. In this episode we talk about what they look for when investing into a company 1:30 "Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit? " 10:30 "How is venture capital different in med tech versus Silicon Valley?" 14:15 "So you guys do, would you say that you guys put more research upfront into investments vs Silicon Valley-style investors?" 16:30 "Due Diligence for, six months or a year, what are you ...
Jun 07, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Silvestro Micera is a professor at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland focusing on developing neural interface implantations in patients. In particular, the following research fields are currently investigated: robotic systems for neurorehabilitation experiments for the investigation of neural control of movement development of neural interfaces with the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). development of hybrid neuro-prosthetic syst...
May 31, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Warren Grill is a professor of biomedical engineering at duke university. He is the chief scientific officer of NDI medical LLC, Managing director of NDI Healthcare fund. He is the cofounder and chief scientific officer of Deep Brain innovations and Chief scientific advisor of SPR Theraputics. His research interests are in neural engineering and neural prostheses including design and testing of electrodes and stimulation techniques, the electrical properties of tissues and cells, and computat...
May 24, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Eric Chang is a Neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at the Institutes of Bioelectronic Medicine and Molecular medicine at the Feinstein Institutes of medical research at Northwell Health . His areas of interests are Neuro-immunology, electrophysiology, microscopy and bioengineering. In today’s episode, Eric talks to us about his work with the vagus nerve and approaches being used in his lab to understand signalling between the nervous system and immune system. Top three takeaways: We haven't ...
May 10, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Marom Bikson is a Biomedical Engineer. He is a Professor at the City College of New York City and also the co-director of the Neural Engineering Group . Marom has been at the City College of New York for over 15 years. He has a B.Sc in Biomedical Engineering from John Hopkins University and a PhD from Case Western University Cleveland. He cofounded Soterix Medical . Marom's research group studies the effects of electricity on the human body and applies this knowledge toward the development of me...
May 03, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dustin Tyler is a Kent H Smith professor at the Case Western Reserve University and the Director of the Human Fusions Institute. He has a secondary appointment as the principal investigator at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veteran Affairs Medical centre. His expertise and interests include directly connecting humans and technology over the neural system to improve human performance and capability. His areas of work include clinical trials of Class III medical devices with emphasis on ...
Apr 26, 2021•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Paul is an assistant professor of Bioengineering, Neurosurgery and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University . He r eceived a B.S. degree in cybernetics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in bioengineering and M.D degree from Stanford University in 2011, 2012, and 2014, respectively. His postdoctoral work was with Jaimie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory . In today’s episode, w...
Apr 19, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Cornwell is the Director of industrial and strategic collaborations for the Cleveland FES centre . He is also Director of the VA Translational Education Mentoring Centre and Associate Director at Care Coulter Translational partnership . In today’s episode, Andrew talks about the importance of translational research, the process and some of the achievements of the Cleveland FES centre. Top three takeaways: Translational work is concerned with solving the inefficient of getting Academic wor...
Apr 12, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nick Halper is a cofounder of Braingrade , where he and his team are developing a brain-computer interface to reverse the cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Before founding Braingrade, he worked at Blackrock Microsystems as a project manager on the product, support, engineering and software teams. In today’s episode, Nick talks about his transition from academia to industry and then from leaving a stable job to joining an early-stage startup in the middle of a p...
Apr 05, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
