Dima Gazda is the CEO and founder of Esper Bionics which is a company that makes a prosthetic arm that gains abilities overtime with you. They plan to use this 'simple' neurotech solution to springboard them solve other larger neurotech problems. ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Services here*** Top 3 Takeaways: We are building an ecosystem and will be building more products in addition to the robotic arm. Next will be a better user control system and then a robotic leg A physician can only add about 3000 patient-years of life but an engineer and entrepreneur can add millions because their inventions can impact more people Neurotechnology will be as big of a change for humanity as cars and computers were 0:30 Do you want to introduce yourself? 4:45 "So what is more difficult than a prosthetic arm that has many degrees of freedom?" 7:15 "Do you want to describe the device?" 8:30 "Does that improvement of control work only for a single user?" 10:30 How has the Russia-Ukraine conflict affected you as you are from Ukraine? 12:15 "Have you had any agreements with any governments like the Ukrainian government to recover injured soldiers?" 13:30 "What are some what are some of your biggest challenges?" 14:45 Iris Biomedical ad sponsorship 15:30 "Do you have any timelines?" 17:15 Do you want to talk about the number of lives improved by being an engineer versus being a physician? 22:00 What's the technology that would add a billion patient lives in the next 10 years? 29:00 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?" Contact dg@esperbionics.com
Lindsay Hartland partners with Neuromodulation Device company Owners, Leaders, and Investors across the US & Europe to source the talent they need in order to succeed with Hanison Green Ltd. ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Services here*** Top 3 Takeaways: Sometimes it's better to not hire somebody but rather have a part-time position or even have them work for free in exchange for shares or honor "The main challenge any company will find when looking to grow their business is the best people tend to be working in jobs that they quite like. There'sa talent shortage. There's not enough people to go around." "I used to assume that when you've got to get somebody more money, it's not. Most person's main driver is job fulfillment. They want to get up each morning and feel good about what they're going to work for and what the company's striving toward. Are they being developed, is there growth within that company? Money is important to all of us, but it's not the main driver." 0:30 Do you want to describe yourself? 3:00 "Why is this important for any startup to recruit?" 5:00 "How do you know who's a good person?" 7:15 Do you help early stage companies figure themselves out too? 9:45 "What's your opinion on that, hire a consultant versus hiring an employee?" 12:30 Iris Biomedical ad sponsorship 13:15 "Let's say hypothetically, I want to earn 250k how would I do that?" 15:45 "What's the mechanics of all this, of this poaching business that you're in?" 21:15 Do you sometimes find these leaders of companies in academia or in other fields or is the switch hard to make? 24:15 "How do you make money?" 30:15 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about?"
Anuj Bhardwaj is the CEO of SecondWave Systems which is a wearable ultrasound noninvasive therapy especially for suppressing chronic inflammation and pain signals. ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Services here*** Top 3 Takeaways: "We're going to use a disposable coupling component that a patient uses to adhere this and couple it to the body for 18 minutes while they remain in a reasonably sedentary condition. They would do that once a day." "The cost of the healthcare system is often between one to $200,000 per year for patients that take biologics like Enbrel. So that's a huge burden on the system" "My advice to other companies like us would be to look at the SBIR program. We're very strong advocates of it. It's really been the main engine that launched us. I'd advise looking at NIH, BARDA, and others too. Then consider if they fit within the mission of what a company is doing and apply." 0:30 "Do you want to describe yourself and ...
Giovanni Lauricella is the cofounder and managing partner at Lifeblood Capital where they find people, money and insight for MedTech startup companies. Giovanni comes on a second time to talk about how to find investment for neurotech startups ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Services here*** Top 3 Takeaways: "If you take bad money it could really ruin a company. Good money simplistically saying is- You find an investor who really knows how to add value to your company beyond simply writing you a check." "An investible story from the eyes of an investor is number one. And number two, when you finally do click send make sure that you're doing the due diligence on the investors with that who ultimately you're reaching out to. That they make sense." "Everything else after that can be shared throughout the diligence process, which typically takes 2, 3, 4, 5 months. You have ample time to share a lot of information with them once they're already interested." 1:00 "Do you want to introduce yourself again?" 4:30 "How do you raise money in a med tech startup?" 9:45 Iris Biomedical ad sponsorship 10:15 "What is an example of bad money and how bad can bad get?" 18:15 "What are some tips for companies as they're raising money?" 22:00 "How do you get in contact with these people?" 28:15 "What's a wrong direction that a lot of people go down that could be easily fixed?" 35:15 "What percentage of that slide deck should be about the people in the company versus the technology? And then where can people find you?" Contact giovanni@lifebloodcapital.com
Dr. Talya Miron-Shatz is an author, researcher, and speaker who is the author of "Your Life Depends on It: What you can do to make better choices about your health" which is a book about medical decision making. She talks about the data generated from neuro devices and what patients can do with it. ***This podcast is sponsored by Ripple Neuro, check out their Neuroscience Research Tools here*** Top 3 Takeaways: There is an opportunity to turn data generated by neuro medical devices into insights that are easy to digest "free, the data, free the data! And I was thinking - to whom? And what are they going to do with it? It's like someone delivering boxes upon boxes of papers to your front door. And you're like I don't know what to do with it. Free the data is great, but to help me make sense of it is even greater." "If you want to design for better usage and for better outcomes, you need to think psychology as well as technology" 0:45 "Do you want to introduce yourself?" 3:45 "How doe...
Dr Josh Siegle is a senior scientist working at the Allen Institute working on large-scale electrophysiology using tools like the Neuropixels probe. He is also heavily involved in the design and distribution of Open Ephys which is an open-source electrophysiology tool. ***This podcast is sponsored by Ripple Neuro, check out their Neuroscience Research Tools here*** Top three takeaways: "The dark matter problem is where the number of cells that we record is almost always less than the number of cells that we actually know to be in the tissue around the electrodes. This could be because there are neurons near the electrodes that just don't fire action potentials, their action potentials look very similar to other nearby neurons, or maybe the listening radius of our electrodes is not quite as large as we would expect it to be." "A big advantage of working at the Allen Institute is that we have very generous internal funding from Paul Allen. And so although we do apply for grants when it makes sense, for most people at the Allen Institute, getting grant funding is not an existential threat to their research." Open Ephys has recently started offering virtual 1-on-1 training sessions to help people get up and running with their tools. This is aligned with their goal of making open-source tools even more accessible throughout the neuroscience community. 0:45 Ladan introduces the episode and the guest, Dr. Josh Siegle 4:00 "What is the Neuropixels probe and how does it work? Why is it important?" 8:00 What capabilities does working with IMEC bring? 11:15 How exactly were you working with IMEC? 12:30 Sponsorship by Ripple Neuro 13:15 How does the pitch of the Neuropixels probe compare to biology? 16:45 What is the Allen Institute like? 20:15 What kind of mix of people work at the Allen Institute? 21:15 "What's the stated aims of the Institute again?" 22:00 What is the Open Ephys project you had worked on before? 27:45 What is the Open Ephys training like? 29:30 Do companies love or hate Open Ehpys? 31:00 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"
Andy Cornwell is a return guest on the show and he is the Associate Director of the Case-Coulter Translational Research Partnership (CCTRP) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. He is currently putting together the second Cleveland Neuro Design Entrepreneurs Workshop. The deadline to submit is June 30th. ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Services here*** Top 3 Takeaways: "The application deadline is June 30th and applications are open now. The workshop itself is September 22nd to 25th in-person here in Cleveland and the workshop is free to students. We provide you with all of the lodging and meals while you're here. We ask you to cover travel costs, but if that's a burden and you could not attend because of that, we have some limited support for travel as well" "Ripple hired five people that they met at the workshop. They provided a lot of expertise and mentorship to the teams and through that process, we were able to basically conduct a three-day-long live action interview and made some offers to candidates. I think they ended up hiring five people out of that program. And some of our other sponsors also made hires out of the program as well." "Innovation is not a Eureka moment. It's not something that just happens to people. It's a discipline that can be learned. And the discipline of innovation is what the workshop is about." 0:45 Do you want to talk about the Entrepreneur Workshop? 2:30 "How's the second one gonna be different?" 4:45 "Were there any companies formed?" 5:30 Iris Biomedical ad sponsorship 6:15 "Who should sign up?" 8:15 Did headhunters come to hire any participants? 9:30 "What's the intention of this workshop?" 12:30 Is this workshop something that can help even those not looking to found a company? 15:30 "What's the main thing that people should learn, even if they don't take go to the workshop?" 17:00 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"
Evan Coopersmith is the galactic head of admonishment and also executive vice president of data science at Agency Enterprise Studio. There they do contract work for machine learning in neuroscience and neurotech. ***This podcast is sponsored by Iris Biomedical, check out their Neurotech Startup Serviceshere*** Top 3 Takeaways: "One of the arguments I've often made is that it isn't only the hardware that holds us back. It is the software. When the software reaches a level of sophistication, suddenly the hardware is orders of magnitude more impactful." "Clearly we have learned how to understand patterns. We call these latent patterns in the data. The challenge we're involved in spoke to this idea of these latent patterns that exist in neurological data. And I think that's where the software has to take the next step of understanding those latent patterns in the same way." "One of the things that we're interested in is the unsexy efficiencies of how do you run data science analysis? In this field, how do you construct the infrastructure for it? How do you ensure that you're not driving your Ferrari on gravel roads?" 0:45 Do you want to introduce yourself? 2:30 What does AE Studios do? 8:00 How do you use machine learning for neuroscience? 11:00 How does your company work? When do they come to you? 12:30 Iris Biomedical ad sponsorship 13:00 Do you want to talk about your checkers and chess software analogy? 20:45 What is your company's headcount? 22:45 What are you guys working on which is not covered by NDA? 25:30 How do you guys run the software? 26:30 Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn't mention?
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 would open up new applications and create whole new industries." "We've just launched in the United States. The Communication Disorders Lab at the New Mexico State University has recently acquired two of our FOXIE systems to conduct research on eye movements during speech and speech comprehension. So you should expect first preprints featuring our system in about half a year." FOXIE is a portable screen-based Eye Tracking system with a sampling rate of 600Hz that connects to any modern compu...
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 blindness. ***This podcast is sponsored by Ripple Neuro, check out their Neuroscience Research Tools here*** Top 3 Takeaways: "The basic 3 steps of the device are to 1) read the spontaneous activity that's there and use that to identify the different cells and different cell types; 2) pass current through each of the many electrodes (a thousand electrodes in the first device) to figure out which electrodes activate which cells and how much; and 3) finally translate that according to the “scor...