DUBAI, United Arab Emirates & PALO ALTO, Calif. & MONTREAL– Neurotechnology Powerhouse NeuroVigil (ranked “Top 10 most innovative companies in health care” by Washington Post and Fast Company) announced at the New Technology & Mental Health Conference keynote during Dubai’s World Expo that it has recruited senior captains of industry, government and academia to scale operations leading up to the launch of its newest non-invasive iBrain™ brain monitor, designated by the New York Times as “an innovation which will change your tomorrow”.
iBrain™ is the world’s smallest non-invasive brain monitor. The device itself is no bigger than a car key. The first generation iBrain™ was released by NeuroVigil in 2009 and since then, the potential for the device has only grown. In 2011 the technology was adapted for use in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) research at the request of NeuroVigil Scientific Advisory Board member, the late Dr. Stephen Hawking. As early as 2013, an individual with ALS was able to spell with iBrain™ and without any implant of any kind. The new iBrain™ will be used to accelerate this communication and to collect data from asymptomatic individuals to expedite the hunt for predictive biomarkers of Parkinson’s Disease, brain cancer and drug overmedication, as well as to track brain state, sleep and drug response in the ICU.
NeuroVigil’s “growth team” of superstar experts were handpicked by its Chairman, CEO, Founder, Dr. Philip Low.
The team is headlined by many seasoned veterans including Dr. Gabriel Vargas, the Berkeley and UCSF-trained former Head of Neuroscience Biomarkers at Roche and of Neuroscience, Early Development at Amgen; Noam Ziv, the Technion-trained Former Qualcomm VP of Technology; Hans-Peter Goertz, a former economist at Roche and Novartis; Devin Goodman, who led Technology Operations for Andrew Yang’s Presidential Campaign; EEG specialist at a major US hospital, Cody Holland; European entrepreneur Boris Blatnik; and the former head of the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada, Dr. David Fransen, who has also previously held the position of Consul General of Canada, in Los Angeles. Stanford and University of California luminaries and NeuroVigil advisory board members, Prof. Kwabena Boahen, a father of modern neuromorphic engineering, Prof. Utkan Demirci, an authority in the fields of cancer detection, synthetic biology and point-of-care diagnostics, Prof. Patrick Mercier, MIT-trained world-class bioengineer, and Dr. Michael Castro, a Columbia-trained internationally renowned medical and Neuro-oncologist have all joined the effort.
The team will help the company scale its “Manhattan Project for the Brain”, a growing international conglomerate designed to accelerate the development of neurotechnology innovations and assist elite universities in leveraging their intellectual capital and support companies built on peer-reviewed science and clinical data, rather than on promises by marketing gurus. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Kilpatrick Townsend, premier Silicon Valley and intellectual property law firms, respectively, as well as the University of Waterloo, the largest international supplier of software talent to Silicon Valley, San Diego’s Launch Factory accelerator, and Wyoming’s Health Innovation Living Laboratory (Wyoming is the project’s “Los Alamos” where many new technologies are to be beta-tested) are strategic partners. Conversations are ongoing with Johns Hopkins, the University of California, as well as Stanford and MIT where Dr. Low has held dual positions as an Adjunct Professor and Research Affiliate, respectively. Following Dr. Low’s keynote address, Montreal committed up to $10M in initial services to the conglomerate across medical partners, including the Health Innovation District, LeoMed, Inc. and CHUM, Montreal’s University Hospital, designated by the US News & World Report as Canada’s Most Innovative Hospital.
The Salk Institute, as well as two of its presidents, including Nobel Laureate Roger Guillemin, and another international innovative hospital are shareholders. Elite venture capitalists Dr. Howard Morgan, co-founder of First Round Capital and Renaissance Technologies and the first investor in Uber, and Timothy C. Draper, co-founder of Draper Associates and DFJ, law firm DLA Piper, two co-founders of Qualcomm and a former chairman of Tesla also invested in the company, which has never accepted any federal support, and which went to the market as early as 2009 with a research contract with Roche followed by another one with Novartis – the company is currently in discussions regarding a research contract with a third Swiss Pharma company regarding ALS, brain cancer and Parkinson’s.
“I know of a no more driven, bright, focused and experienced collection of people, some whom I met across the table while negotiating, assembled towards a common cause since the original Manhattan Project,” said Dr. Low during this keynote address. “The upshot of our collective work, in my opinion, besides assisting people who need it the most, will be better health and, ultimately, the ushering of the Brain Age: billions of asymptomatic people and their physicians seamlessly accessing their brain health in real-time, without any surgery or hospitalization, thanks to a constellation of non-invasive, cruelty-free, wireless, affordable and precise brain technologies.”
“I first met Dr. Low over 10 years ago when I was head of CNS Biomarkers at Roche in Basel. At that time, I was already able to appreciate the enormous power and promise of NeuroVigil’s technology. Dr. Low has a grand ambitious vision to better humanity through a technology which enables us to monitor brain health non-invasively and also allows communication through thoughts alone. Although this sounds like an improbable vision, Philip has the right mix of strong scientific training, unusual intelligence and chutzpah to make this endeavor successful,” said Dr. Gabriel Vargas, incoming Chief Medical Officer of NeuroVigil.
“Dr. Low’s bold dissertation thesis literally created a new paradigm for the study of brain waves. So far, the iBrain has proven to be an invaluable adjunct to pharmacological clinical trial research. Unintended adverse drug side effects involving the nervous system can now be identified sooner and at a significantly reduced cost to the developer. Yet, despite NeuroVigil’s success to date, I believe the most significant applications of this technology are yet to come. The future will see home-based biometrics becoming a central feature of modern medical practice as screening, monitoring and tracking of innovative health data evolve into standard components of the electronic medical record. Central to these assessments will be a brain health status measurement that has both diagnostic and prognostic validity, and given their prominence in this area, NeuroVigil will likely be the industry leader,” predicted Dr. Mario Orlandi, Executive Director, Technology Assessment, Johnson & Johnson, as early as 2012. He was echoed in his comments at the time by Dr. Baltazar Gomez-Mancilla, Executive Director of Neuroscience and Translational Medicine at Novartis: “NeuroVigil is now expanding quickly and attracting qualified personnel in the US and overseas… The company has strong science, good leadership and a bold vision.”
