Kirill Korotaev is the CEO and founder of Purple Gaze which is an AI Platform for collecting data from the brain using eye movements. ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Services here*** Top 3 Takeaways: "There wasn't any significant innovation in the eye tracking technology for the last 15 years. And we thought that if we use modern computer vision and image processing techniques, we could make it much more accessible and easy to use, which in turn...
May 09, 2022•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast E.J. Chichilnisky is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Ophthalmology at Stanford University. His research has focused on understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of electrical activity in the retina that convey visual information to the brain, and their origins in retinal circuitry, using large-scale multi-electrode recordings. His ongoing work now focuses on using basic science knowledge along with electrical stimulation to develop a novel high-fidelity artificial retina for treating incurable b...
May 02, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Duane Mancini is the host of the Project Medtech Podcast which talks about Medtech Device industry. They talk about the success storiies, advice, pitfalls, trends and more. Duane also helps run Project Medtech which accelerates medical technology to improve patient lives. Finally, Duane and Giovanni Lauricella have started the Medtech Money podcast about how to raise money for medtech companies. Top 3 Takeways: "Actually defining the problem too is a big issue. And it's something that I didn't r...
Mar 21, 2022•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brock Lindsey and Jack Gelman are researchers at West Virginia University. Brock is an orthopedic oncologist who deals with bone and muscle tumors. Jack is a plastic surgeon interested in peripheral nerve surgery. Together they work on targeted muscle reinnervation in osseoimplants to bring back control for amputees. Top 3 Takeaways: Integrating prosthetics into the bone allows for better bone health since the bones are then under load Neuromas are transected nerves that continue to grow and cau...
Mar 14, 2022•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast A few weeks ago the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) published an article based on a Freedom of Information request to look at the records of animals involved in trials at Elon Musk's Neuralink company. PCRM alleges that 15/23 monkeys used in the experiments have died and that they have been treated poorly. In a rare move from a Musk company, Neuralink published a rebuttal blog explaining their position explaining some of the nuances of what happened. In this episode, I go ov...
Mar 07, 2022•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Karandeep Singh Badwal is a Quality and Regulatory Affairs Consultant in the field of Medical Devices. He is also the host of the MedTech Podcast where he talks to leaders in the field of Medical Technologies Top 3 Takeaways: "Once you understand your product, who's going to be using it, you can then build a risk assessment around that. But if you do not know what your product is, and you do not know the modes of failure, you really are going to struggle with this process." "So the UK is relativ...
Feb 28, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Sefler and Radhika Gupta head up NTX Services which is a distinct for-profit entity affiliated with the non-profit NeuroTechX. They offer consulting and recruitment services with the vision to aid in the commercialization of neurotechnology at a global scale. Top 3 Takeaways: "Our projects range from [client] projects coming right out of labs, to setting up a whole new division for a larger company, to describing and setting the marketing strategy for an [international] startup, to doing C-...
Feb 14, 2022•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Domyahn is a partner at JD Lymon where they help companies develop healthcare strategies. They help companies understand their unique value proposition and optimize their market potential. Top 3 Takeaways: "the FDA writes zero checks. They give you a license to hunt, but they don't guarantee you kill anything" "What I'm hearing more and more is the first question out of investor's mouth isn't what's your FDA pathway, it's what's your reimbursement strategy. Because FDA is at least a somewha...
Feb 07, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tim Marjenin is the Vice President of Neurology Regulatory Affairs at MCRA where he helps neurotech companies get through the challenges of being approved by the FDA. Tim has had over 16 years in the regulatory side of things before now advising the companies. Top 3 Takeaways: "A big part of what I'm doing right now. It's trying to help them figure out, okay. What are you trying to do? How can I help you put that in FDA's language and language that FDA is going to understand?" "I think probably ...
Jan 31, 2022•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Arun Sridhar is a cohost of the Skraps podcast which talks about some of the behind-the-scenes stories in science and technology. JoJo Platt is the other cohost and she has been on the show before as well. Today, Arun and I are talking about the recently unveiled $9.8M Neuromod Prize which aims to reward those that are able to come up with a precisely controllable neuromodulation treatment. Arun thinks the prize could've been made better and I (Ladan) think that it is nice to see other forms of ...
Jan 27, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Scott Burwell is the founder and CEO of Neurotype which makes a portable EEG headset, the NeuromarkR, which quantifies brain physiological responses to possible triggers for people with Substance Use Disorder. This enables the recognition of brain biomarker targets for treatment and tracking changes over the course of recovery. Scott@neurotype.io. Top 3 Takeaways: "What we're trying to do is use these brain sensing devices to measure some objective biomarkers that can help make objective decisio...
Jan 24, 2022•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jeremy Greenberg works for the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum and has written a report about Privacy and the Connected Mind . The report is an extensive look into some of the challenges of privacy in the BCI space. Top 3 Takeaways: "A lot of the risks in this base really stem from the fact that neuro data is sensitive personal information. This is biological. It relates to mental privacy. These devices can be used to derive inferences about a person's likes their dislikes, their fears, emotio...
Jan 17, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tim Jorgensen is the author of Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life which looks at the history of bioelectrics all the way from prehistory to the modern era. The book is very informative and shows that current neurotechnology has very deep roots. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691197838/spark https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Life-Electricity/dp/0691197830 Top 3 Takeaways: "The word electricity comes from the Greek Latin word for Amber. That's where it originall...
Jan 10, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Grand is the CEO of Medtech Innovator which is an accelerator for startups in the medical technology space. It has been going for many years and the companies that they select to go through the 4 month process have gone on to be very successful. Apply for this year's cohort, deadline January 31st https://medtechinnovator.org/apply/ Top 3 Takeaways: "MedTech innovator as an accelerator is the world's largest accelerator for medical technology" "1,800 companies applied last year across all of...
Jan 04, 2022•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yannick Roy is the founder of NeurotechX which is a community of neurotechnology enthusiasts with over 18,000 members from around the world started in 2014. They have also held in-person events to help bring people together. Due to this large community, Yannick has also started NeurotechX Services which brings together this large community to help companies and people. Top 3 Takeaways: "we don't have any outside funding, government funding. We needed to bootstrap everything. The organization was...
Dec 13, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Marc Russo is the president of the International Neuromodulation Society which is a nonprofit group of clinicians, scientists and engineers dedicated to the scientific development and awareness of neuromodulation. Dr Russo runs a large multidisciplinary pain clinic in Australia. He has conducted a number of first-in-man studies of novel neuromodulation implants as well as designing unique leads and waveforms in spinal cord stimulation (SCS). Top 3 Takeaways: "Over more than a 20 year journey ...
Dec 06, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gautam Sadarangani is the President & COO/CTO of TENZR by BioInteractive Technologies, a digital health system that provides a better way to retrain movement for the hand, wrist, and elbow. Top 3 Takeaways: "Our core competence here is the fact that we're able to measure the limb with sufficient accuracy and sufficient resolution for rehabilitation purposes while being very unobtrusive for the person to wear essentially 24/7" "Quantifying and motivating is a big deal. It's not different than whe...
Nov 29, 2021•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Doucet is a neuroscientist and biomedical engineer with 10+ years of FDA experience in medical device regulation, and 13+ years of Johns Hopkins experience in discovery science, and 6+ years of management experience at FDA and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He has extensive knowledge of medical device regulatory pathways to drive technologies from conception to market. Top 3 Takeaways: "That's what clients are paying for, I can detect the signal from the noise and all the stuff the compa...
Nov 22, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 
