Neurotech Startups Meet Investors at LSI Medtech Conference

by James Cavuoto, editor

March 2024 issue

Executives and entrepreneurs from several neurotechnology firms participated in the 2024 LSI Emerging Medtech Conference in Dana Point earlier this month. The conference featured numerous sessions with medtech investors and strategics offering insights on commercialization issues.

Among the neuromodulation firms making presentations at the event were Bionic Vision Technologies, BackStop Neural, Neuroelectrics, Neuronoff, Neuspera Medical, Neuralace Medical, MicroTransponder, Stimdia Medical, Cala Health, Lungpacer Medical, Nia Therapeutics, and Neurosoft Bioelectronics.

A plenary presentation devoted to “The Decade of Brain Health,” featured Ana Maiques, CEO of Neuroelectrics, Ken Mariash, CEO of Sinaptica Therapeutics, Brent Vaughan, CEO of Cognito Therapeutics, and Kip Roberts, senior director of business development at Medtronic. Mike Labbe, director of business development at Velentium, served as moderator of that session.

Roberts pointed out several new application areas of neuromodulation that offered potential growth. These include mood disorders, addicton, and migraine as examples. “We’re bullish about medical devices in neuroscience,” he said. “It’s not just therapeutic, it’s also monitoring. So devices can get smarter over time."

Vaughan pointed out that neuromodulation has the potential of reaching non “druggable” targets, such as those impeded by the blood-brain barrier. He advanced the idea of looking at disregulated networks as druggable targets. “But you wouldn’t drug that target with chemistry, you would drug it with some signal that modulates that electrical network,” he said.

“I remember the days when we used to think of certain regions of the brain as being responsible for depression,” Mariash said. “Now our understanding of the brain has evolved and we need to think of the brain as multiple overlapping functional networks. The ability to read the signals coming off the brain and personalize the therapy to the individual unlocks so many possibilities,” he said. He described Sinaptica’s therapy as a form of “sonar” for the brain—pulsing the brain and then listening for what comes back.

Maiques said she hopes that AI and machine learning will help researchers personalize brain therapies for patients.

Raymond Cohen, CEO of Axonics, offered some advice to startups in a featured session on March 20. In the process, he revealed some inside stories about the growth and development of his firm. Cohen said founding the company was a process of investigation. He spoke to patients who had implanted neurostimulation systems and asked them for feedback before getting clinicians involved. Then he consulted with implanters and studied the procedures used to implant devices. He also looked at the competitive landscape, which led him to look at the market for sacral neuromodulation.

“Whoa, this is a market that’s generating $500 million worth of revenue with one player and full reimbursement,” Cohen recalled saying at the outset. He also noted that Medtronic’s SNS offering was short-lived and not MRI-compatible. “We can do better than that,” he recollected.

Regarding staffing, Cohen said he looked for individuals who were flexible and could apply their skills toward anything. He also stressed the importance of treating employees well. “I paid them really well,” he said. “I made sure they got great benefits—we pay 100% of the healthcare costs of our employees and their significant others.”

Another valuable plenary session concerned FDA breakthrough device designation. The session featured Kwame Ulmer of Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health and a former FDA deputy division director, Carolina Aguilar of INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, Lishan Aklogof Lucid Diagnostics, and Nathan Beaver of Foley & Lardner. During the session, Ulmer advised attendees that based on preliminary data from Essenvia, it’s probably not worth the effort for 510(k) firms or diagnostics vendors to pursue breakthrough device designation. But it would be worth it for firms pursuing approval of Class III devices via the de novo route. He suspects that’s because 510(k) firms have lesser clinical data requirements.