Meron Gribetz, Inner Cosmos - Implanted Brain-Computer Interface | LSI Europe '22

Transcription

Meron Gribetz  0:03  

So hi, my name is Meron Gribetz. I'm the CEO of a neuro tech company called inner Cosmos, which treats some of the largest chronic disorders on the planet. I'd like to share with you today a mysterious link between three of them. Depression, attention and anxiety, which we treat. Just to underscore this point, there's 140 million Americans every year that use attention or depression drugs, that's more users than have iPhones. So let's understand what that really means. You know, unscrew the skull off my head and the head of humanity. And we're going to look into the changes that occur in depression and in these various disorders. According to the most modern understanding of them, quite a complex topics, I'd like to pare it down to three key areas first, how it works, second, where it works, and third, what we can do about it. First, how does it work? Well, depression and other cognitive disorders are what we call network apathy. These network apathy is mean that there's not a single depression point in the brain, but rather, it's distributed across a set of points organized and networks, specifically with depression, four of these networks get out of balance, you can see on the left hand side over here, two of them get really strong and two of them get weakened. And I'd like to focus with you today on two out of these four networks. First, the infamous default mode network. This is the introverted network of the mind. This is the network that processes your inner world, specifically trauma and rumination trauma, the memory of for example, a car accident that one has undergone, and rumination is that voice in their head that go over and over how they can avert it next time, when that voice gets really strong, okay, it starts to steal resources from another network in the brain. The first network is the bad guy for depression. This is the good guy for depression. It's called the cognitive control network. The cognitive control network, the unsung hero of the mind, is what you're now using to process information from me when we have a conversation with our loved ones. And when our dog licks our arm and remove when we meditate or watch a sunset, all the good things in our lives are processed from the outside world. And this is the cognitive control network. Now problem with depression is default mode, network steals the resource from cognitive control, and we get locked inside of our heads. And the story of the cognitive control network becomes even more powerful than that. Because it turns out that also with ADHD, it gets weakened. So you see over here, the rest of the networks in ADHD are intact, but the cognitive control is reduced. And that opens a really exciting opportunity for us. Because it turns out that if we can stimulate with precision this we can network, rebalance the brain back into health, for the largest chronic disorder on the planet, we can also do so for the second largest, making for a humongous market opportunity. So we now understand how it works, let's understand where it works. About six years ago, I met Dr. Eric Boothheart Eric is the leading advanced neurosurgeon in the United States having pioneered technologies like laser neurosurgery, ECOG, and many others. Eric and I co founded this company in our cosmos, Eric showed me a secret of the brain, which is that the center of the cognitive control network is an area called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that target over there. And if you could stimulate that you can bring the depression networks back in to balance and ameliorate these two enormous diseases. And there's lots of science to back this decades of clinical trials. And I'll share some of the information with you later on. So we need to hit this point very precisely. And unfortunately, technologies that exist today cannot do so. I'm going to give you a survey of the last 70 years of those technologies and about one or two minutes. Starting with of course, antidepressants. Antidepressants are the most widely prescribed solution for depression. And they blast your entire brain with neurotransmitters. So you're hitting the relevant pinpoint that yellow line but you're also hitting many unintended areas of the brain. And what that means is that you end up with severe side effects such as suicidality when we switch cocktails, mental fog fatigue, libido loss, and of course, the efficacy is just over placebo. So it's very, very low. And what that means is that out of this enormous market there's 300 million people before COVID diagnosed with depression and that was expected to about double. A third of those patients do not even react to drug the most severe. Third, we call treatment resistant, depressed patients. These patients are what the World Health Organization considers the most debilitated disease in the world because suicidality comes from there, about a third of them will attempt to commit suicide at least once in their life. And for these patients, we need the heavy cavalry, which is called electric shock therapy. AECT is often the last resort for these patients, because you're inducing a seizure in the entire prefrontal cortex to force reset these networks back into balance, much like you'd hard press A on button on your computer if you wanted to restart it, not very good for the computer, not very good for the brain. Because it's so unspecific, it's hitting the entire prefrontal cortex, leading to side effects that are, for example, personality change. It's often said, you go to ECC, and you come back a different person. Amnesia, and of course, just the ick factor of plugging yourself into the wall five days in the hospital, it just is too much for people. About 99.5% of this enormous market is completely untreated, because they're too afraid of electric shock therapy. And this debilitating disease again, the most debilitating disorder is left untreated, and that's where Inner Cosmos comes in. So we've completed our quick survey into how this works, where it works. Let's talk about let's talk about the future. So a group of scientists some of the leading neuroscientists in the world, such as Dr. Ed Boyden, one of the top few neuroscientists that I know from MIT, Eric Ruthhart from WashU. And Darren Doherty, a leading psychiatrist from Harvard and I and several others came together. And we started thinking, how is it that drugs 50 year old technology, electric shock therapy, seven year old technology, how's it possible that for the largest disorder in the world, we're using horse and buggy era technology, and we win, there's Tesla's driving around. So we decided, why not create the Tesla of the mind, if you will, the absolute most modern and precise brain computer interface ever created for depression. And that's exactly what we have done. There's three levels of personalization to this, it's called the Digital pill, I have it here in my pocket to share with you in a moment, the digital pill is number one, the most custom and precise neuro technology ever created for depression, and or technology in general credit for depression, we have been steering and shaping. You can see, by the way, this tiny little guy over there, that is precisely hitting the yellow target. What we're showing here is beam steering and shaping can guide to map to every person specific cortical physiology never been done before. The second feature of it is that it can not only write to the brain, it also read from the brain with precision. So we can create mood graphs, depression graphs, for the first time accurately showing the doctor what's going on in the mind of the patient, saving the healthcare industry billions for misdiagnosis of severe suicidal depression. And third, my favorite feature by far is that the digital pill doesn't even go in the brain, it just gets slipped under the skin in a 30 minute outpatient procedure, much like a cosmetic implant. And that means that many more doctors can use it, and millions more patients can gain access to it. In a sense, we've democratized brain chips BCI. So I'm really excited to share with you this device is enabled by the most sensitive and advanced Asus or computer for brain chip on the planet. And the best part about it is that it's actually real. So we can see over here, I'm gonna have to come a little close to the camera. But this is the first human grade manufactured such implant and it's just a few eyelashes stick. It's 10 times smaller than anything else that you've heard of globally, on the brain chips BCI market, and we're really excited. It took us six years to build this thing. We closed our first round about a few months ago. We're starting our second round shortly. You can get in touch with us here at innercosmos.io Your email me personally at innerCosmos@innerCosmos.io. I want to thank you all I'm just going to share one piece of news we have not shared yet publicly. The FDA has just given us IDE approval, which is the first time it has done so for a novel depression stimulation technology and almost 20 years. That's right, the largest disorder on the planet has not seen major innovation and technology in almost 20 years. something really big is happening we have also and again totally for the first time I'm sharing implanted our first patients successfully I want to thank you all for your time and take care.