This MIT spinout wants to spool hair-thin fibers into patients’ brains

You can’t start a company without a healthy dose of courage, and that’s certainly the case Neurobionics. The MIT-spinout thinks it could one day improve the lives of millions of people who live with neurological conditions like depression, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

If all goes well for the 18-month-old suit, its approach “could further address the peripheral nervous system for pain, incontinence and a bunch of other applications,” said Steve Jurvetson, a prominent investor at Future Ventures.

How? with what In contrast to these big ambitions, the tech of neurobionics is small. Specifically, neurobionics aims to pipe what has been developed into the brain through blood vessels in the brain – using a procedure similar to stent placement to deliver neuromodulation therapy.

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

It’s a pretty nifty alternative to drilling a hole in someone’s skull, a long-standing procedure with deep brain stimulation. Traditionally, when certain disorders do not respond to medication, metal electrodes are implanted in the brain to generate electrical impulses and control those abnormal movements.

Neurobionics’ device isn’t just less invasive—the company is using carbon nanotubes instead of thin-film platinum or iridium oxide, which are common materials for those electrodes. While metals are minimally toxic and conduct electricity well, they can also dissolve, limiting their lifespan and causing tissue damage. On the other hand, carbon nanotubes are cheap, apparently last a long time, and they make getting an MRI a lot easier. (Among other things, the metal can create bright spots in MRI images, making it difficult to see the brain.)

CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup M.J. According to Antonini, the whole shebang is the result of 10 years of research on fiber technology at MIT. He co-founded the company while still a student at the school, where he received three patents that gave MIT a small ownership stake in the business.

He took an interesting route from point A to point B. On a Zoom call, Antonini showed off a coiled version of the barely-visible fiber, explaining that the 55-year-old holds doctorate degrees from both Harvard and MIT. A program known as the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.

Calling it a “special program that they don’t advertise for the wrong reasons,” Antonini said his studies included two years of medical school at Harvard, followed by years of medical engineering and medical physics at MIT. After that, he decided to “move beyond the cool (research) paper” and “build a real product and a real medical company.”

Indeed, Antonini, who is French, said he stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher for a few more years to think about how he could bring that portfolio of tech into the real world. He eventually left school in early 2023 with Nicky Driscoll, a fellow postdoctoral researcher at MIT and today the CTO of Neurobionics.

It will take a long time to figure out what happens to their fiber technology. Like Jurvetson, Antonini asserts that eventually, neurobionics’ bio-electronic fibers could be used in a whole spectrum of applications, including delivering drugs, ablating tissue in the brain, and treating conditions related to the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system.

However, “finally” is still some time away. For now, the outfit has closed $5 million in funding led by Dolby Family Ventures, with participation from Future Ventures, Grammar Capital and several other backers, and will use the capital to complete work on its clinical device.

Once completed, the next step will be to try to demonstrate its safety and efficacy in pigs, which have numerous similarities to humans in terms of anatomy, physiology and genetics. The FDA will then review that work, after which Neurobionics can apply for an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE). It can then begin its first-in-human feasibility studies.

When asked if his technology could actually hit the market, Antonini hesitated for a moment before proposing 2030.

Of course, he can’t work at a startup if he doesn’t feel like he can navigate these next steps.

Patient investors like Jurvetson should help. “Deep brain stimulation has been shown to work in stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, chronic pain, tremors and others.” “But 99% of people who could properly benefit refuse because it requires major open brain surgery with needles implanted deep in the brain,” Jurvetson wrote in an email.

As far as Jurvetson is concerned, tech like neurobionics throws that market wide open—as there are even concentrated pockets of large and advanced hospitals offering the surgery today.

“The application domain” for the startup’s “minimally invasive stent” enthuses Jurvetson, “is huge.”