InBrain Neuroelectronics is building graphene brain-computer interfaces to treat Parkinson's and epilepsy

Speaker 1: What's going on? Welcome to the show. How are you?

Speaker 11: Thank you. Very good. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: Please, since it's the first time on the show, introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

Speaker 11: Yes. My name is Carolina Aguilar. A lot of people call me Carolla. I am the CEO and the cofounder of InBrain New Electronics. Yeah. And we are a graphene based brain computer interface therapeutics company that actually is developing the most intelligent interface between the neural system and AI to restore health for billions.

Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. So walk me through brain computer interfaces and the decision tree that got you to graphene specifically. I'm familiar with, like, the first decision is probably invasive versus noninvasive. We've talked to a number of founders that have taken either approach. How did you how did you confront that first question?

Speaker 11: Yes. Well, I call them implantable and non implantable systems. Yeah. Yeah? And in our case, we're an implantable company. Yeah. We believe that the real signal processing that is going within the neural system is actually deeper in the brain and and to listen carefully to what it says, what the neural system says, being able to decode it but also modulate it. Mhmm. We need to be close to those neurons and interact with those neurons firsthand.

Speaker 1: Okay. So when I hear modulate, it sounds like not only processing information that's coming out of the brain, but also potentially writing information back into the brain. Is that the long term vision?

Speaker 11: And this is, the the magic of graphene is actually about reading and writing very effectively at micrometric, precision within I the think that's why we took, let's say, higher risk to get an advanced material into this funnel Yeah. Because we see that the benefit is is incredibly impactful.

Speaker 2: Okay. What what are what are the most near term commercial applications?

Speaker 11: Yeah. So the the Morgan Stanley report stated the market in 400,000,000,000, and we thought that we needed to bring a platform with three product verticals to actually penetrate such a such a big market. Mhmm. So we are creating three products. One is, let's say, not implantable, actually. So it's a semi chronic it's a semi chronic platform, kind of like the modern Utah array. It's like a 100 contacts of graphene that can read and write. We we went into tumor and epilepsy resection at the beginning, and that one is pretty close to commercialization. We're almost there. The second product is the implantable platform for the brain. So, this is an implant on the brain for Parkinson's disease. So, we didn't do, sorry, assistive BCI because we saw a 1,800,000,000 market that is suboptimal that we could actually displace very easily with this technology. So we decided to go therapeutics into Parkinson's. And the third one is the same platform, but instead of a, let's say, brain sensor, we connect a vagus nerve sensor that is actually able to decode all the fibers that go into the different organs. So we have a therapeutic target for each of the organs just by targeting that nerve in the neck.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. What about, the actual implantation process? We followed from, Neuralink. They had to build a whole robot just to drill into the skull. It's incredibly high precision. Are surgeons capable of implanting this at this stage, or will there need to be other robotic devices that are developed to actually deploy this technology safely?

Speaker 11: It's it's an excellent question. I'm coming from Medtronic. I spent ten years in neuromodulation and another three in diabetes. And I think in the future, when micro robotics are ready, we will have a a very close relationship between our interfaces and micro robots that probably can deliver this implantation in thirty minutes. But today, when there is not micro robots and we are not Elon Musk, we decided to actually have our platform ready for the current surgical workflows that today exist. So we are not changing much from the neuromodulation workflows.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 11: And it's an easy procedure. Two hours one or two hours, you know, is enough. In the case of the neck, it's forty five minutes.

Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. That's very impressive. Well, congratulations on all the progress, and thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for stopping by the show.