MobiHealthNews’
Emerging Technologies Series
spotlights organizations developing, scaling and investing in innovative healthcare technologies. What follows is Part 2 of a seven-part series:
Dave Rosa, president and CEO of NeuroOne, sat down with
MobiHealthNews
to discuss how the company's electrode technology can help treat neurological conditions like epilepsy by recording brain activity, stimulating tissue and, in some cases, ablating tissue to reduce or eliminate seizures.
MobiHealthNews:
Tell me a bit about NeuroOne.
Dave Rosa:
NeuroOne is a company that's been around since about 2017. We're a public company that trades on Nasdaq, and what we do is we design and commercialize thin-film electrode technology that's used for neurologic conditions that you've probably heard of, like epilepsy and Parkinson's disease. I call it the brain-pain and drug-delivery company.
So, you've got these three different pillars with this unique electro technology that really deal with conditions in the brain, treating pain throughout the body, and then, also the ability, using the same platform, to deliver drugs, like really gene therapies and cell-based therapies for neurological conditions as well.
Some of the devices are film, but some of them also look like thin wires. Both technologies can really be placed anywhere in the body. It just depends on the application.
MobiHealthNews:
So it's not even necessarily a brain implant.
Rosa:
Not yet. It will be. So that's one of the things that we're working on is to be able to commercialize a device that would be part of a permanent implant, but to kind of distinguish between what we're doing and companies like Neuralink. Most people have heard about Elon Musk's brain company [Neuralink]; what they're doing is a complete system, and they're really targeting things like paralysis. So, they want to be able, at some point, to get someone who is in a wheelchair, that's a quadriplegic, and get them to a point where they're able to get up and walk around.
Really, the aspect that we're focused on is the electrode itself, not the hardware, but the film or wire-like technology that communicates with the computer. What we've been able to do is get it to perform multiple functions, like its ability to record what's going on in the brain, the ability to stimulate that brain tissue with the same device, or actually burn the tissue to eliminate things like seizures.
While all these devices communicate with the brain. It's not the same as what Neuralink is doing, which is really intended to go after kind of the worst of the worst clinical situations.
MobiHealthNews:
How does it actually work?
Rosa:
So, it literally is a material that has metal embedded in it. So, there are different points of contact on the device, metal material, and when that is connected to a machine – think of an EKG because it's probably the easiest example. They put electrodes on your chest to measure what's happening, the electrical activity in your heart. We're doing the same thing, except it's in the brain. And when it's connected to a machine that actually takes that information and puts it into a waveform, it's operating the same way. The only difference is, in addition to that diagnostic piece, we can also actually perform a therapeutic function, either by stimulating that tissue or, when connected to a different piece of equipment, burning that tissue to prevent seizures or other problems from occurring.
MobiHealthNews:
How many patients have been implanted with the devices?
Rosa:
We're a public company, and I have to be careful about what we release publicly that hasn't been released already. We haven't given any numbers out. I mean, we've had the technology out now for a little over a year. So, there's a fair amount of patients that have been treated, and every day, you know, we're doing additional cases through our distribution partner, which happens to be Zimmer Biomet, which is a very large, well-known orthopedics company.
MobiHealthNews:
How effective have the implants shown to be?
Rosa:
Very effective. In fact, one of our patients was highlighted on "Good Morning America."
It was really the story of a young teenage girl who got to the point where she could no longer go to school, participate in sports, and today, it's over a year now, she's been seizure-free, and she's in college, and life's moving on. Her quality of life had been greatly impacted in a positive way. And that's kind of what we're seeing in most of our patients.
Now, we only have a couple of patients who have gotten to a year post-therapy, but many more are in the queue. And I would say, from what we've said publicly, the majority of our patients are either completely seizure-free after the procedure, or they've shown a great reduction in the number of seizures they're having, as well as the severity of the seizures.
MobiHealthNews:
How about Parkinson's patients? You mentioned that was one use case.
Rosa:
So, that's an area that's under development now, and what they do with those patients, it's different for every one of these indications, but in Parkinson's patients, really the physiological issue for those patients is that they all show a reduction in dopamine production in the brain, and there is a direct relationship between dopamine and people that have Parkinson's. They all have dopamine deficiencies, and for some reason, when you stimulate brain tissue, it increases dopamine production, which then is able to reduce or completely control the amount of movement disorders or episodes that these patients have. But it's purely, it's a device that really the main function is to stimulate the brain tissue, and that's still in development for us.
MobiHealthNews:
How invasive is the surgery to do the implants?
Rosa:
So, you know, invasive is, it's actually a relative word. So, our technology is less invasive than what a Neuralink would be, and it's a different type of invasive than what Precision Neurosciences does.
So, the link for us with Zimmer is that Zimmer Biomet has this robot that is used to pre-drill the holes in the skull that allow for the electrodes to be inserted exactly in the precise areas of the brain that the doctor may want.
If you look at one of our devices, it's actually 0.8 millimeters in diameter, so it is a little bit thicker than a wire, and what this robot does is it pre-drills the holes wherever the doctor wants the device to go. There's no skull that's removed. There's nothing like that. It's just a tiny hole.
And if you would have this type of surgery, let's just say today, and you were discharged tomorrow, in a lot of these cases, they don't even shave the skull on the patient. So no one would know that you had brain surgery.
So, it's still what I would consider invasive, but not as invasive, whereas they have to remove bone and things like that to place the devices.
One of the areas that we're going after is lower-back pain.
The way they treat patients that have lower-back pain is they put these wire electrodes in through a needle that's placed in the back, and what we can do is take one of our film devices, and instead of the doctor having to make an incision in the back, you can literally thread that through the same needle, but the beauty of it is, is that now you can stimulate a much broader area in the back without the patient ever having to get an incision for that.
So, in the brain, it requires a small hole, but in other parts of the body, we really designed the other technologies to be able to just fit right through a needle that these doctors are accustomed to using.