How The RI Life Science Hub is Supporting New Brain Therapies

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Welcome to this special edition of the Angel Nest. I’m David Heminaway. I’m a five-time founder and now an active angel investor, and today we’re talking about the Rhode Island Life Science Hub and the support they’re providing to grow the life science sector in New England and help great ideas get to market faster.

Among the most important priorities is the work being done on the human brain. Today we meet Dr. Leigh Hochberg. He’s professor of engineering at Brown University, and we’re going to talk about his work and the amazing advances in implantable brain computer interfaces and what it could mean for patients afflicted by neurological diseases or loss of limbs.

A bit later we’ll speak with Thorne Sparkman. Thorne’s the managing director of the Slater Fund, and we’ll learn how investors are getting involved. But first, I want to welcome Dr. Hochberg.

He’s the director of the BrainGate Consortium and Clinical Trials. Thank you very much, doctor, for making time to be with us today on the Angel Nest. My pleasure.

Thanks so much for inviting me. So tell us about these amazing advances. It seems just like things are moving at warp speed these days.

It has been a pretty amazing time for this field. And if we think about people who have had injuries or illnesses of the nervous system that result in paralysis. So if we think about somebody who’s had a cervical spinal cord injury and is unable to move their arms or their legs, or perhaps has had a stroke and is having difficulty moving or speaking, or somebody who has ALS, that is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, who is progressively losing the ability to move and to speak.

A simple way to think about all of those diseases or injuries and many others is that there’s been a disconnection between an otherwise perfectly functioning brain and a perfectly functioning body. That person who is trying to move their arm is unable to do so, or if they’re attempting to speak, is having difficulty or is unable to do so. And if we could imagine that we could reconnect brain to limb, or that we can know exactly how somebody is trying to move their hand, and we could, for example, re-enable the ability to control a cursor on a computer screen, that type of technology might be one that would help to improve that person’s quality of life, allow them to interact more easily, whether it’s on a computer, or with their family, or with their health care provider, or anybody else.

And the approach to trying to achieve those goals are called implantable brain-computer interfaces. And an implantable BCI is a device that’s placed into the brain, records brain activity associated with, for example, the intention to move, and then doing something useful with that information, for example, re-enabling the ability to control one’s computer, or perhaps even re-enabling the ability for speech to appear as text on a computer screen, and then heard aloud. And in what’s now been an ongoing 21-year clinical trial through our BrainGate consortium, there’s been really some exciting progress, from what once was, as others have described as potentially science fiction, to some demonstrations, not only in our consortium, but across the field, of people who are unable to move their arms or legs, controlling computer cursors, people who are unable to speak, attempting to speak, and having those words appear with reasonable speed and reasonable accuracy on a computer screen, and then heard aloud.

Give us some sense of where we are now, in terms of helping people restore their everyday functions, and what you think is possible in the medium term, let’s say, in the future that you and I will be around for. So, all of these implantable brain-computer interfaces, the goals of which, again, as we’re talking about them so far, are for the restoration of communication or mobility, these are all investigational devices, to use the formal term. If they are in clinical trials, they’re being conducted under investigational device exemptions, and thus far have all been feasibility and early safety and feasibility trials, really to discover how well might these devices work, what additional tweaks might be needed, or could the initial design of these devices benefit from before moving into pivotal trials, but the demonstrations have been impressive.

People who have not been able to move an arm for years, think about moving their arm, controlling a cursor on a computer screen, typing on that screen, people who are losing the ability to speak as a result of ALS attempting to speak, and just the neural activity from the cortex, from just a little part of the cortex, being decoded in real time and having that text, that intended speech appear on the screen, and then using any number of methods, having that computer-generated speech heard aloud, and that has allowed for some restoration of communication between participants in the studies and their families and their care partners and others, has allowed for control of robotic assistive devices, allowing people who have been unable to move their own limb to take a sip of a cinnamon latte just by thinking about the movements of their own hand or a bite of a chocolate bar, and as I’m describing these, they sound like demonstrations, and they are, but they’re really the proofs of concept, which over 20 years have allowed for the de-risking of this entire field for industry, and it is the reason that now there are more than half a dozen companies, probably a dozen plus, that are actively developing planted brain-computer interfaces with some of these same goals of restoring communication and mobility. Do operations like the Rhode Island Life Science Hub help these creations get to market faster and more efficiently, in your view? They certainly can. It is so important for particularly startup companies to have the opportunity to tap into wherever the experience has been in that field, which is often in academia before it makes it to industry, and it’s really valuable when those industry partners can interact easily, which often means locally, and I think in many cases there’s just a great synergy that arises from having the industry down the block or a few blocks away, and the nice thing particularly in Rhode Island is nothing is that far away, so it can be really valuable not only to advance the science but to provide the opportunities for, I think, both new and other established companies to make rapid advances in the field.

Yeah, well, hard to imagine a more noble pursuit than restoring the communication and mobility that humans enjoy is so vital to us being who we are. Thank you, Dr. Hochberg, Professor of Brown University. My pleasure.

Thanks so much. Now we want to get the investor perspective, and for that we want to talk to Thorne Sparkman. Thorne’s the managing director of the Slater Fund, which has been an investor in ventures related to brain therapy and technology.

He and his group have been supporting the local startup ecosystem in Rhode Island and New England for years, so he’s uniquely positioned to talk about new initiatives like the Rhode Island Life Science Hub. Thorne, you’ve been a frequent guest here, so it’s a pleasure to have you with us again, and it’s at a time when new and vast resources are being devoted to innovation in Rhode Island, which just seems great. What’s the impact so far for founders and investors? Well, first of all, David, thanks for having me.

It’s great to be here on your podcast, and you always have your finger on the pulse. What I’ve seen here from the impact of the Rhode Island Life Science Hub is, first of all, it’s a rapid injection of some money, but where it’s gone, you know, we have a beautiful new life sciences building out here, and that just removes the hurdles to building bigger and bigger companies, and now there’s starting to be some grant dollars flowing to pretty early-stage companies. They’ve also done some recruiting of companies from outside the state, but I focus more on things that are built by entrepreneurs here internally, so seeing non-dilutive capital flow to those small companies is a real shot in the arm for local life sciences entrepreneurship.

And of course, life science is very expensive to develop, right? So how important do you think are these public-private partnerships? I would say more important than ever, so let’s look at it from the 50,000-foot view. The largest life science investor by far in Rhode Island is the NIH, and if you look back over a decade, that’s, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into labs in the hospital systems and in Brown and the University of Rhode Island. There’s other capital sources like the NSF and DoD funding 2,200 software engineers in the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, but that government capital is a really key investment, so I think of it as an investment even though they don’t get equity for these things.

So, Thorin, the timing seems good because this new support is coming at a time of accelerating innovation, and of course, the human brain is one of the most important priorities, and we’ve been talking a lot about that on this episode. Are there particular areas of therapy or technology that you’re focusing on there? Absolutely. I think the areas that I’ve focused on most are two.

One is neurostimulation, and the other is around neurodegeneration, so think Alzheimer’s and other maladies of the brain, so very different approaches but a similar target. If we were investors in John Donahue’s company Cyberkinetics, John Donahue from Brown is one of the godfathers of the brain-computer interface. In fact, only probably 55 brain chips have been implanted worldwide, if you exclude China, which we don’t really know about, and of those 55 chips, 20 were implanted in Rhode Island, so this is literally one of the seminal spots for that activity.

John Donahue was the key researcher at Brown and went on to run the Wyss Institute in Switzerland, so his research, which is called BrainGate, became the company Cyberkinetics, which was the original use of thinking thoughts to move a cursor on the screen, and then thinking thoughts ultimately to influence your environment, drive a wheelchair, things like that, and that actually became a venture-backed company, and then a public company, and then a public company with pipes, and ultimately that technology has reverted back to Brown, where it continues to be developed to the next generations, and the other area that I’ve become fascinated with is a little bit broader than that, it’s neurostimulation, so can we include that in the category, David? Sure. Okay, so in that space, for 50 years, you’ve had people stimulating the heart, and they put leads in on various places in the heart, and that electricity communicates with the muscles in the heart, and that was the original pacemaker technology. These days, that same technology of stimulus through these leads is now applied to the spinal cord, and to the vagus nerve, and to the sacral nerve, and it’s been a really successful area.

Almost all the startups get acquired by Boston Scientific and Medtronic, but they’ve been addressing things like chronic back pain, Parkinson’s, sleep apnea, incontinence, all kinds of maladies, and now that the FDA sees it as safe and effective, entrepreneurs, there’s an industry in what can stimulation do next, but Alzheimer’s is the great problem of our day, as you and I get older, and watch our parents age as well, and if there’s ever a safe and effective Alzheimer’s drug, when there is a safe and effective Alzheimer’s drug, it’ll be the best-selling drug of all times. Do you think this is where Rhode Island will specialize moving forward? I think these are strengths at Brown, and to the extent that Brown is one of the biggest sources of innovation, I would say yes. So aging and diseases of aging, absolutely.

Neuroscience is a key to Rhode Island’s future. Lauren Sparkman, Managing Director of the Slater Fund, and I would say one of the original folks in Rhode Island to get behind startups who’s been doing it the longest, so it’s great to check in with you, get your perspective. Thanks so much.

Thanks for having me, David. You can learn more and connect with Dr. Mark Turco, the rest of the team at the Rhode Island Life Science Hub, and you can also reach today’s guests at theangelnest.com, where I hope you’ll get in touch if you know of an interesting story or a company that we should talk about. We produce The Angel Nest with help from Rob Higley and Charles DeMontebello at the controls of CDM Studios in the historic Art Deco Film Center building just west of Times Square in New York.

I’m David Heminway. Thanks for listening. So long until next time.