You can’t start a company without a healthy dose of daring, and that’s certainly the case with NeuroBionics. The MIT-spinout thinks it could one day improve the lives of millions of people who live with neurological conditions like depression, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.
Famed investor Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures said that if everything goes right for the 18-month-old outfit, its approach could further address “the peripheral nervous system for pain, incontinence, and a bunch of other applications.”
How? With what? In contrast to these outsized ambitions, NeuroBionics’ tech is tiny. Specifically, NeuroBionics aims to pipe what it has developed — bioelectric fibers the width of a human hair — through blood vessels in the brain using a procedure similar to a stent placement to deliver neuromodulation therapy.
The fibers are powered by a fairly standard implantable battery that’s shaped like an Airpod case, designed to last five to 10 years, and is used by other medical device makers for spinal cord stimulation, among other things.
It’s a pretty nifty alternative to drilling a hole in someone’s skull, as has long been the process with deep brain stimulation. Traditionally, when certain disorders don’t respond to medication, metal electrodes are implanted in the brain to produce electrical impulses and control that abnormal movement.
NeuroBionics’ device is not just less invasive — the company is using carbon nanotubes instead of thin-film platinum or iridium oxide, which are common materials for those electrodes. While the metals are minimally toxic and conduct electricity well, they can also dissolve, limiting their lifespan and causing tissue damage. Carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, are cheaper, can ostensibly last longer, and they make getting MRIs a whole lot easier. (Among other things, metal can create bright spots in MRI images, making it harder to see the brain.)
According to MJ Antonini, CEO of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, the whole shebang is the outcome of 10 years of research on fiber technology at MIT. He co-founded the company while a student at the school, where he secured three patents that give MIT a small ownership stake in the business.
He took an interesting path from point A to point B. On a Zoom call, as Antonini showed off a coiled version of the barely visible fiber, he explained that he has a doctorate degree from both Harvard and MIT through a 55-year-old program called the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Calling it a “niche program that they don’t advertise for the wrong reasons,” Antonini said his studies involved two years of medical school at Harvard, followed by years of medical engineering and medical physics studies at MIT. After that, he decided to “go beyond the cool [research] paper” and “create an actual product and an actual medical company.”
Indeed, Antonini, who is French, said he stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher for a couple more years to ponder how he could bring that portfolio of tech into the real world. He ultimately left the school in early 2023 with Nicky Driscoll, who was a fellow postdoctoral researcher at MIT and is today NeuroBionics’ CTO.
It’ll take a long time to know what becomes of their fiber technology. Like Jurvetson, Antonini insists that eventually, NeuroBionics’ bio-electronic fibers could be used in a whole spectrum of applications, including to deliver drugs, ablate tissue in the brain, and treat conditions relating to the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system.
“Eventually” is still some time away, however. For now, the outfit just closed $5 million in funding led by Dolby Family Ventures, with participation from Future Ventures, GreyMatter Capital, and several other backers, and will use the capital to complete work on its clinical device.
Once completed, the next step would be trying to demonstrate its safety and efficacy in pigs, which share numerous similarities with humans in terms of anatomy, physiology and genetics. The FDA would then review that work, after which NeuroBionics could apply for a investigational device exemption (IDE). It could then launch its first-in-human early feasibility studies.
Asked when its technology might actually hit the market, Antonini hesitated momentarily before proposing 2030.
Of course, he wouldn’t be working on the startup if he didn’t think it could navigate these next steps.
Patient investors like Jurvetson must help. “Deep brain stimulation has been shown to work in stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, chronic pain, tremor and others.” Jurvetson wrote in an email, “But 99% of people who could benefit rightly refuse because it requires major open brain surgery with needles implanted into the deep brain regions.”
As far as Jurvetson is concerned, tech like NeuroBionics’ throws that market wide open — including because there is but a concentrated pocket of large and advanced hospitals that offer the surgery today.
The “application domain” for the startup’s “minimally invasive stent,” enthuses Jurvetson, “is huge.”
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