A Weekend of Futurism at Stanford

www.brain-mind.org founders Dr. Michael McCullough and Reid Hoffman during Sunday’s fireside chat

This past weekend we were invited to attend the BrainMind summit at Stanford University. BrainMind is a supercharged colloquium of neuroscientists, venture capitalists, philanthropists and thought leaders focused on high impact innovations in medicine. As a result, we got a three day total immersion in a range of forward thinking topics, often high concept, sometimes controversial, but always exciting.

Brain Computer Interface

This was a hot topic of the conference whether chatting with Elon Musk’s Neuralink executives near the coffee bar or listening to Matt Angle, who founded Paradromics, formally present his company’s technology. These teams are making progress on devices that can more efficiently get bioelectric and digital signals to translate and communicate with each other bi-directionally through chips implanted in the human brain. Such devices have been shown to improve the lives for people with paralysis or damaged sight. Future uses could include disorders of consciousness (e.g. coma) or stroke recovery. Many hurdles need to be worked out such as sampling rates and chip sizes, etc. for these technologies to reach large market potential, however. The implications are nonetheless huge.

Advances in Neurostimulation, Mapping and Neuroprosthetics

Neurostimulation is a well established area of medical technology. One only has to look at the $2.5 billion market capitalization of Nevro, a mere specialist company in the space, to appreciate the magnitude of the opportunity. We were intrigued by USCF’s Dr. Edward Chang talk on advances in brain mapping and its uses in speech, language and epilepsy.

Preventative Medicine

As medical device investors it’s sometimes hard to take a breath and think about what lifestyle enhancements can be implemented to promote brain wellness and hopefully prevent neural degeneration or even possibly stave off Alzheimer’s. Much scientific attention at the summit was given to the medical value of exercise and wellness practices such as meditation or even Qigong for long term physical and mental well being.

Other

Many other topics related to unmet clinical needs were discussed such as novel psychopharmacological modalities to deal with depression (back to the 60’s anyone?) or using mental exercises to reduce pain (and thus opioid use).

Other device companies that were interesting to us included SyncThink which uses eye tracking for concussion and Insopix which makes miniature integrated microscopes for brain imaging.

BrainMind was a great summit. We look forward to the next one!