Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions

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 T...

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 th...

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...

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...

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 p...

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: "...

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 schemat...

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 alienat...

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 unt...

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 e...

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...

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...

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 Neura...

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...

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...

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 interfa...

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 cent...

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 a...

Jon is the founder of Greenlight Guru (quality management software exclusively for medical device companies) & a medical device guru with nearly 20 years industry experience. Jon knows the best medical device companies in the world use quality as an accelerator. That's why he created Greenlight Guru to help companies move beyond compliance to True Quality.   Top 3 Takeaways If it isn't documented,...

Professor Aldo Faisal is the Professor of AI & Neuroscience at the Dept. of Computing and the Dept. of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. His work is in Machine Learning and eye tracking to improve neurotechnologies. Top 3 Takeaways "What we do is we get people to move into our living lab/studio flat and they live their daily lives, and we record everything that they do, how they do, where...

Dr Florian Solzbacher is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Blackrock Neurotech which has the Utah Electrode Array, the only FDA-approved neural implantable device. Blackrock Neurotech recently closed a $10 million financing round, led by Christian Angermayer's re. Mind Capital with participation from Peter Thiel, German entrepreneur Tim Sievers, and Sorenson Impact's University Venture Fund II.   Top...

Thomas Oxley is a neurosurgeon who is also the founder of Synchron which makes the Stentrode . Instead of requiring invasive brain surgery for implantable neural devices, they are able to use stents such as those used in cardiology to collect neural signals   Top 3 Takeaways: Stentrode implantation it's one of the simplest stent procedures. Got a $40 million Series B funding round from Khosla Vent...

Giovanni Lauricella is a Vice President of the Mullings Group which is a Medical Device Technology recruitment firm. He helps startups in the neurotech space find talented people from the most experienced down to the entry-level positions.   Top 3 Takeaways: "Always pull on your network, always pull on that trust factor because people go to work for people. That's what they do, especially in start...

Kunal Ghosh is the founder and CEO of Inscopix which uses imaging tools to understand the brain in both health and disease.    Top Three Takeaways: Miniscopes were invented out of a need for tools that have the ability to monitor and record large-scale neural circuit activity Imaging tools have the advantage of scale, single-cell resolution, longitudinal recording capabilities, and labelling for s...

Ulrich Hofmann is a Professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany working on some of the cutting edge and newest things in the field of neurotechnology.   Top Three Takeaways The 8 micron limit for not causing a foreign body response might actually be closer to 1 micron Magnetoelectric nanoparticles might be the solution towards getting to the dream of having a 0 dimensional neural probe Neur...