You can't start a company without having enough courage, and that's the case with NeuroBionics. The MIT spinout company believes it could one day improve the lives of millions of people suffering from neurological conditions such as depression, epilepsy and Parkinson's disease.

Steve Jurvetson, a prominent investor at Future Ventures, said that if all goes well for the 18-month-old company, its approach could further address "pain in the peripheral nervous system, incontinence and a host of other applications."

how? What to use? Compared with these vast ambitions, NeuroBionics' technology is small. Specifically, NeuroBionics aims to deliver neuromodulation treatments by delivering bioelectric fibers it has developed - bioelectric fibers the width of a human hair - through blood vessels in the brain using a procedure similar to stent placement.

The fibers are powered by a fairly standard implantable battery shaped like an Airpod box, designed to last five to 10 years and used by other medical device manufacturers for things like spinal cord stimulation.

Like the long-standing process of deep brain stimulation, this is a very clever alternative to drilling holes in the skull. Traditionally, when certain diseases fail to respond to drugs, metal electrodes are implanted in the brain to generate electrical impulses and control abnormal movements.

Not only is NeuroBionics' device less invasive, the company uses carbon nanotubes instead of thin-film platinum or iridium oxide, the common materials for these electrodes. While these metals are extremely low-toxic and conduct electricity well, they can also dissolve, limiting their useful life and causing tissue damage. Carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, are cheaper, ostensibly last longer, and they make MRI imaging much easier. (Among other things, metal can create bright spots in MRI images, making it harder to see the brain.)

MJ Antonini, CEO of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, said the entire project is the culmination of 10 years of fiber technology research at MIT. He co-founded the company while in school and received three patents that gave MIT a small ownership stake in the company.

He took an interesting path from point A to point B. During a Zoom call, Antonini showed off a coiled version of the nearly invisible fiber, explaining that he earned his PhD from Harvard and MIT through a 55-year-old. The program is called the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program.

Calling it "a niche program that they don't advertise for the wrong reasons," Antonini said his studies included two years at Harvard Medical School, followed by several years at MIT in medical engineering and medical physics. study research. Afterwards, he decided to "move beyond cool (research) papers" and "create an actual product and an actual medical company."

In fact, Frenchman Antonini said he stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher for a few more years to think about how to bring these combinations of technologies into the real world. He eventually left the school in early 2023, along with Nicky Driscoll, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT who is now the chief technology officer of NeuroBionics.

It will be a long time before we know how their fiber optic technology will fare. Like Jurvetson, Antonini maintains that NeuroBionics' bioelectronic fibers could eventually be used in a variety of applications, including delivering drugs, ablating brain tissue and treating diseases related to the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system.

However, "finally" will take some time. The company has just completed a $5 million round of financing led by Dolby Family Ventures, with participation from Future Ventures, GreyMatter Capital, and several other backers, and will use the funds to complete work on its clinical device.

Once completed, the next step will be to try to prove its safety and effectiveness in pigs, as pigs share many similarities with humans in anatomy, physiology and genetics. The FDA will then review the work, after which NeuroBionics can apply for an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE). It can then launch its first-in-human early-stage feasibility study.

When asked when his technology might actually hit the market, Antonini hesitated before suggesting 2030.

Of course, he wouldn't work at the startup if he didn't think it could guide the next steps.

Patient investors like Jurvetson have to help. "Deep brain stimulation has been shown to be effective for stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, chronic pain, tremors, and more," Jurvetson wrote in an email. "But 99 percent of the people who benefit are correct. The doctors refused because it would require a major craniotomy and the insertion of needles into deep areas of the brain."

As far as Jurvetson is concerned, technology like NeuroBionics opens up the market—because currently there are only a handful of large, advanced hospitals offering the procedure.

Jurvetson enthuses that the “field of applications” for the startup’s “minimally invasive stents” are “huge.”