The next frontier : stimulating the brain to treat epilepsy, Alzheimer's, depression and maybe my son...

Someone walks into your life and blows you away. That was Ana Maiques

Ana Maiques is CEO of Neuroelectrics . I was moderating at LEAP a few weeks ago. As I scanned the programme I could not believe my eyes. Ana was presenting an innovative health technology I had never heard of, a technology that has the potential to transform my eldest son's life.

This is a deeply personal story. My gorgeous son Eli has had near daily epileptic seizures since he was 5 months old. Today Eli is 22. He has severe learning difficulties, associated autism, needs 24 hour care and has had too many nasty seizure falls to mention. CBD has been a gamechanger yet his daily debiltating seizures persist.

I contacted Ana immediately and over the next few days got to know an incredible woman: she is highly intelligent, engaged and a lot of fun. This is an abbreviated transcript of a conversation we had about this pioneering tech.

The brain is the next frontier

Ana : There are 100 billion neurons in our brain and they're communicating constantly at 240 mph but we don't know how these connections work. We have been obssessed at the company to decode how the electric network in the brain functions.

If it is disrupted, if it is creating a disease, what can we do to heal the disease?Neuromodulation or brain stimulation is a method to use electricity to compensate for the defaults in the network.

What can this technology be used for?

Ana : Our first flagship clinical trial is for epilepsy. As you may know when someone suffers from epilepsy a part of their brain is too active. We 'inject' negative currents and bring the excitation down so that we can prevent the seizures for happening. We are also working on depression and Alzheimer's.

The results?

Ana : In epilepsy, in our FDA trial we showed that we could reduce seizures by 47% with 10 days of stimulation 20 minutes every day.

What is the stimulation?

Ana : It is very low voltage electricity 'injected' into your brain from the outside using a cap with electrodes. It is a part of that electricity that really gets into your brain. It can be positive or negative and that really modulates the neurons to fire more or less.

In depression, it stimultes a different part of the brain from epilepsy. There we have good results though not as advanced as epilepsy. Alzheimer's is a different mechanism. We are not injecting direct current but alternating current so we are training the brain on the cognitive side to perform much better so hopefully improve memory and cognition.

Side effects

Ana : Some people may feel an itching under the electrodes when we are injecting the current but there are no major side effects compared to other drugs or implantable devices. Our current is so small and that is why we need repetition. One session is not enough. Our protocols are for 10, 20, 30 sessions. The brain has plasticity, so the more you stimulate it the more it learns to behave in a different way. Neurons that fire together wire together.

Digital twins and personalisation

Ana : What we are developing is a computational neuroscience model of the brain. It is basically a digital replica of your brain on the cloud and where we can predict how you will respond to a treatment and personalise the best treatment for your brain. We take your MRI, your EEG and we really build a 3D model of your brain. Before we give you a treatment we can test how you will respond. We are building two digital twins - one in epilepsy and one in Alzheimer's. We are pretty advanced in the epilepsy one on the biophysical model and now we are building the electro-physiological model - not only how your brain is physically in terms of your skull thickness and your conductivity but also how your brain behaves electrically as we believe there are major differences between brain patients.

A final note from Isabelle - Needless to say I am contacting Eli's neurologist to get Eli on a trial for the cap!

Aline Noizet Jordi Serrano Pons Aman Sethi Fares Sahnoune Franziska Thomas Cath Kumar Adam Brown

#epilepsy #digitalhealth #neuroelectrics #brain #alzheimer's #depression