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

[email protected]

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 does your work fit into neuro technology?"

5:15 Sponsorship by Ripple Neuro

6:15 "What's your kind of solution forward with this?"

9:30 "The trend of medical devices and neurotechnology generating more data to have to sift through, is that helping the problem or is that worsening the problem"

11:15 Is app and user experience design of these new devices going to be one of the most important factors?

13:45 "So what's the solution for this? Is it just hiring more designers and psychologists?"

20:30 "What point in the development cycle of a medical device or neuro technology, should people start thinking about this?"

22:45 Is this different if the technology is implantable?

25:15 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"

https://talyamironshatz.com/

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 Services here***

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 computer via USB

0:45 "Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit and your company?"

2:00 "How did you get into eye tracking?"

5:30 How have things improved since you started out in this?

9:30 Iris Biomedical ad sponsorship

10:15 "What's the company doing right now? And what are you planning on doing next?"

12:30 "What is the footprint of your device?"

13:30 Have you worked with Iris Biomedical before?

14:45 Do you want to talk about how the invasion of Ukraine has affected you as a Russian?

15:45 "If you had unlimited funding, what would you go after?"

16:30 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"

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 “scores" we have for the different cell types into patterns of activity. This is way more complicated than any neural interface that's been designed."
• "Plasticity in the brain is not there just because the brain wants to be plastic. It's there because it's evolutionarily valuable to have a plastic circuit. If you think about it from an electronics point of view, a plastic circuit is costly."

• "Our understanding of the retina is 30 years ahead of our understanding of the brain. That's not because retina neuroscientists are smarter – it's because the retina is more accessible and easier to understand. So our understanding in the retina always precedes our understanding of the cortex."

0:45 "Do you do you wanna introduce yourself?"

1:30 "So how did you get into this?"

3:45 "What is your proposal versus how things were being done before?"

9:45 What are the 20 types of retinal cells?

14:30 "What's is this a specific design of the device? And then what's your role in this as well?"

17:30 "Are you guys working with other companies in the field too?"

19:30 Sponsorship by Ripple Neuro

20:00 Are cortical implants more or less sensitive to your 'orchestra' approach?

26:15 "What are some of the biggest challenges in this or if you had unlimited funding, what would you throw that funding at first"

35:00 "How are you interfacing with these different cell types?"

38:30 " That all sounds very tedious. And especially if you're talking about thousands of electrodes, is this done by hand, or is this the poor graduate student that has to do this? Or is there a way to automate it?"

43:15 "What are some timelines that we can expect with this technology?"

44:30 "What's the difference between you and Dr. Palanker?"

46:15 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"

Duane Mancini is the host of the Project Medtech Podcast which talks about Medtech Device industry. They talk about the success storiies, advice, pitfalls, trends and more. Duane also helps run Project Medtech which accelerates medical technology to improve patient lives. Finally, Duane and Giovanni Lauricella have started the Medtech Money podcast about how to raise money for medtech companies.

Top 3 Takeways:

• "Actually defining the problem too is a big issue. And it's something that I didn't really realize was an issue. They're asking questions that are going to validate their problem rather than actually going out and doing some in-depth research. Is this really a problem elsewhere?"

• "Ince you've identified a problem, you have to be a historian of how has this problem been attempted to be solved in the past?"
• "Regulations should not dictate your safety plan"

0:45 Do you want to describe your journey of how you got into this?

6:30 : What are the topics and themes of what do you usually cover on both of those podcasts?"

8:30 "What are some problems or challenges that a lot of entrepreneurs face and that's maybe easily fixable?"

14:30 Want to talk about your work before Project Medtech?

18:30 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"

Brock Lindsey and Jack Gelman are researchers at West Virginia University. Brock is an orthopedic oncologist who deals with bone and muscle tumors. Jack is a plastic surgeon interested in peripheral nerve surgery. Together they work on targeted muscle reinnervation in osseoimplants to bring back control for amputees. Top 3 Takeaways:

• Integrating prosthetics into the bone allows for better bone health since the bones are then under load
• Neuromas are transected nerves that continue to grow and cause pain. They've removed some that are the size of golf balls
• WVU has done 28 of these reinnervation surgeries. 500 papers have been written about this, 400 of them since 2020

0:45 "Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?"

3:45 How does a cadaver arm reinnervation work?

4:45 "What are the advantages of osseointegration? What are some of the challenges in this?"

10:45 How do you integrate these devices with nerves and how does it improve gait?

17:15 Are these just EMG devices that listen in on muscle movement?

18:45 "Is this something that's common or is this something that only you guys can do? And then also maybe how many patients have you guys worked on in this way?"

21:45 What would you improve with unlimited funding?

25:30 "You're saying that there would be an advantage to going directly into the brain versus going into the peripheral nerve and what would be the advantage of that?"

27:15 "I want to talk about WVU, do you want to talk a little bit about your institution, why you chose it?"

30:00 "Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?"

A few weeks ago the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) published an article based on a Freedom of Information request to look at the records of animals involved in trials at Elon Musk's Neuralink company. PCRM alleges that 15/23 monkeys used in the experiments have died and that they have been treated poorly. In a rare move from a Musk company, Neuralink published a rebuttal blog explaining their position explaining some of the nuances of what happened.

In this episode, I go over some of the facts of this case, my experience with animal studies, and then play a good video from The Tesla Time which goes into more detail.

https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/us-department-agriculture-look-monkey-experiments-funded-elon-musks-neuralink