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Several hundred pain clinicians attended the 28th Napa Pain Conference in Napa, CA earlier this month. The event, produced , took place at the Culinary Institute of America’s Copia facility, with participation from on-line attendees. Featured presenters at the event included Daniel Carr, professor emeritus of public health at Tufts University, Carol Warfield, Edward Lowenstein professor of anaesthe…

Several hundred pain clinicians, neurosurgeons, and neuromodulation industry professionals assembled in Orlando, FL earlier this month for the 2021 Mid-Year meeting of the North American Neuromodulation Society. The event, which augmented the society’s January 2021 web conference, was the first in-person neuromodulation meeting for many attendees since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The mee…

In order for the nation to build a strong neurotechnology industry, there needs to be a coordinated effort among the key players in government, academia, industry, the military, and the investment community, all working together toward a common goal. Such an effort has been underway for the last several years—not in the U.S., but in the U.K. In 2018, the Royal Society assembled a working group of neurotech professionals from academia and industry to help them identify key themes in neural interface technologies.

The market for peripheral nerve stimulation systems has become increasingly crowded in recent months, as new competitors have emerged to treat neurological disorders such as chronic pain and overactive bladder. At the recent mid-year meeting of the North American Neuromodulation Society in Orlando, FL [see conference report, p6], executives from six PNS vendors described their product offerings. These included Nalu Medical, SPR Therapeutics, Stimwave, BlueWind Medical, Mainstay Medical, and Neuspera Medical.

Investor interest in funding startup and early-stage vendors of implanted brain devices continued to flourish in recent weeks. Coming on the heels of Peter Thiel’s and re.Mind Capital’s $10 million investment in Blackrock Neurotech [NBR May21 p2], Elon Musk’s Neuralink earlier this month announced a $205 million series C round led , with participation from Google Ventures, DFJ Growth, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, Founders Fund, and Gigafund.

Neuroscientists, neuroengineers, neurosurgeons, and related professionals assembled online earlier this month for the 2021 version of the Neural Interfaces Conference. A spinoff of the original NIH Neural Prosthesis Workshop, this year’s virtual meeting was produced jointly with the North American Neuromodulation Society. The two-day event kicked off with an NIH/FDA pre-session co-moderated Disorde…

One of the signs that a new industry or industry segment is poised for growth is the emergence of new competitors to challenge the incumbent players in that space. We are clearly seeing that come to pass in the neurotechnology industry. The first neuromodulation industry segment to experience this was spinal cord stimulation when Advanced Neuromodulation Systems (now Abbott) and then Advanced Bionics (now Boston Scientific) challenged Medtronic’s dominance in that space.

Neurologists and neurosurgeons treating individuals with Parkinson’s disease have used deep brain stimulation to help hundreds of thousands of patients who do not respond to pharmaceutical interventions, such as L-dopa. But neuromodulation therapy has also helped shed light on the underlying cause of the disease, which in turn informs new therapeutic approaches. In 2018, Philip Starr, at UCSF developed an adaptive version of DBS that adapts its stimulation only when needed based on recorded brain activity.

Since the first spinal cord stimulation devices emerged more than 50 years ago, neuromodulation vendors and research institutions, have sought to improve the performance and decrease the size of the devices. One challenge confronting them is that larger electrodes, with greater surface area, provide better therapeutic benefit but more invasive implantation procedures. Several vendors, including Mic…

As is the case with other industries, the neuromodulation industry endeavors to select product names that are well thought out and increase the likelihood of patient and clinician acceptance. Medtronic’s AdaptiveStim and Tivic’s ClearUP are two examples that come to mind. But what neuromodulation vendors don’t often consider—and what they have far less control over—are the names of the neurological disorders that their products treat.