Electronics
Luca Ravagnan, CEO, WISE
not efficacy, it’s not safety – it’s the perceived risk. Patients are rightfully afraid of surgery, of the associated costs and the post-op pain. And if you can use a technology that uses a simple needle injection, which is as minimally invasive as possible, to place an easily removable device, then you move away from the fear of surgery – and scars, for that matter. It reduces the risk to something that we can wrap our minds around. And then the only question is ‘Can we find the right waveform?’
This means that the Injectrode is the only implanted component for treatments that rely on stimulation on demand. It’s similar to how a patient may take an aspirin to treat a headache instead of implanting a pain drug pump; we believe that on-demand treatments do not need a signal generator to be placed in a surgery (and replaced when its battery runs low). That said, for treatments that require 24/7 stimulation, the Injectrode allows for a much longer period to find the optimal stimulation waveform, likely drastically increasing the responder rates for neuromodulation. We are also developing adapters that allow us to connect to commonplace implantable pulseform generators (IPGs), ensuring compatibility with current treatment and reimbursement codes. It’s all coming. With that in place, patients and clinicians can try out neuromodulation as a safe way of treating a chronic condition that they may no longer be able to treat with drugs on account of the side effects. An opioid taken as a pain suppressant may lead to addiction over time, but you can use neuromodulation to block pain without that risk.
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
Electrical stimulation of nerves works by different mechanisms of action to drugs, so it can often be used in an additive manner while reducing the need for high drug doses. Importantly, reducing the dosage required to successfully treat a condition greatly extends the period that a drug may safely and effectively be used. Neuromodulation is a strategy for enhancing long-term patient benefit. That is something that some drug companies, and initially only drug companies, have realised and started to invest in. In 2012, GlaxoSmithKline started going really deep into the neuromodulation pathways for pain. They have their own venture fund, Action Potential Venture Capital, which seems to be interested in the areas that GSK initially identified – where neuromodulation can make the biggest impact – because drugs that are used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, general inflammatory diseases, general pain diseases and many other conditions have immense side effects.
There are really significant benefits for patients that come from using neuromodulation in conjunction with a drug. Drug companies are realising that they have drugs sitting on the shelf that patients can’t take at a higher dosage anymore, because the side effects are overshadowing efficacious treatments. Now, those drugs may actually be applicable to a much larger patient base, because neuromodulation makes it possible to reduce the dosage while maintaining the same positive effects. This is where Medtronic, Abbott and other device manufacturers meet GSK, J&J and Pfizer. They all want to provide better treatments with fewer side effects and they all have to deal with patients’ fear of surgery. That’s what you have to take out. ●
Luca Ravagnan is CEO of WISE, a Milan and Berlin-based company developing a new generation of implantable leads for neuromonitoring and neuromodulation using a patented ‘supersonic’ manufacturing process. Its Cortical Strip, composed of platinum electrodes in a soft, thin film of medical-grade silicone, is the first highly-conformable intraoperative neuromonitoring electrode to achieve a CE mark.
Manfred Franke, CEO, Neuronoff
Manfred Franke is the CEO of Neuronoff, the California-based developer of the Injectrode platform, which is injected from a syringe and mechanically stabilises inside biological tissue to form a highly conforming, compliant neural electrode in vivo. As such, it can remove the need for surgery for many neuromodulation treatments.
Above:
The Cortical Strip is the first neuromonitoring electrode of its kind to achieve a CE mark.
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