[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. This is Tom Salemi of Device Talks. Welcome to the Abbott Talks podcast. Over the past few years, the world has come to recognize Abbott as a company dedicated to helping people live happier and healthier lives. In this podcast series, we'll talk with the healthcare leaders, the executives, and the engineers who are working every day to develop new technologies to help people live their best lives.
I know you'll enjoy this episode of the Abbot Talks podcast.
Hey, everyone, this is Tom Salemi. Welcome back to the Avid Talks podcast. I'm thrilled to be here with our co host, Kayleen Brown, the amazing managing editor of Device Talks. Kayleen, great to be on the show with you again.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Well, thank you for having me. And I love all of the amazings. Keep that coming.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, there's. There's not enough amazings in the dictionary. I guess there's only one amazing in the dictionary. But. But you are. You are capital A amazing. And I'm also thrilled that we have an amazing topic to talk about today. I love Kayleen. I love neuromodulation. I think it's one of the cooler med tech spaces. Do you agree?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: I completely agree. It's actually one of the reasons that I was so intrigued with medical technology was just the idea that you can.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: You can support and you can, you.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Can, you know, treat conditions that we understand, conditions that we can put our finger on. But talking about pain as one example, that that is a really real thing. And, you know, how do you treat pain? And pain has so many issues around it. So the idea how neuromodulation can help support that is really encouraging outside of all of the, or in addition to rather all of the amazing benefits of neuromodulation. So really interested in better understanding what it is and how we can use neuromodulation to help support other conditions and treat patients.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. This is certainly a magical quality about it. I think my first neuromodulation memory was when I first wrote about Neuropace back in the late 90s.
And I remember reading that saying, oh, my God, you can stop an epileptic seizure with a bit of energy. It was pretty amazing revelations. So I'm thrilled to dig deeper into the neuromodulation story, Kayleen. And we have a great expert to help us do that as our guest today, Yagna Pathik. She's the medical science manager of Abbott's neuromodulation business. Yagna, thank you for joining us on Abbott Talks.
[00:02:33] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me here today.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: So, Yagna, we have a lot of questions. One, I think that we already kind of prefaced that we really want to better understand neuromodulation and, of course, Abbott's relationship to neuromodulation.
But before we do that, we always like to ask you, how did you find your way into medical technology, the best industry in the world?
[00:02:56] Speaker D: Yeah. So, you know, I've been with Abbott for about seven years. I started here in 2018, but my relationship with neuromodulation has been a little bit longer. I studied it as part of my graduate career.
You know, so I've been in the field for about 15 years. But really, if you're asking about, you know, the motivation or the inspiration for going into medical technology as a whole, I will say that I. You know, when I was. When I was younger, I was really fascinated by space, but also the brain. And then I really loved learning about the vastness of the universe. And eventually I realized that the complexity of the nervous system really does mimic a lot of the intricacies that we see around in the universe. And so that really inspired my love for, you know, you know, just curiosity in general, but also my kind of passion into how can we actually use technology to treat, you know, diseases of the brain and the nervous system? And so I ended up pursuing biomedical engineering, and here I am.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Were you. Were you looking at aerospace initially or.
[00:04:04] Speaker D: I was actually. Yeah. So I was looking at aerospace engineering, and I had very much made up my mind to. To be a double major. Aerospace engineering and math, because I loved numbers that much. And.
But my. You know, there was a little bit. There was a part of me that also was really interested in medicine. And so I really got influenced by my mom, who found out about this very integrative program, which was fairly new at the time that I was entering college. And she was like, hey, you love medicine, you love technology.
Why don't you try this thing called biomedical engineering? And one of my first exposures there was to a myoprostatic limb, and that's how I got hooked.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Wow. My son is studying mechanical engineering, wants to go to aerospace. I've had that conversation with him a few times. And your mom was better at it than I am, apparently, because he's still going to aerospace, and someday, someday we'll lure him into Medtech. But that's a great story. One of us.
[00:05:04] Speaker D: Exactly.
This case is still pretty cool, but I love our field, for sure.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Do you feel as though there's kind of two thoughts that came in mind? So I'm an Instagram lurker. So I look at posts, but I don't do anything with them or post myself. And I follow a space site or a space profile. And what always strikes me is they take imagery of, let's say, the pupil, like our human pupil, and then they'll match it to space. And the, like, symmetry and the geography and the design of the shapes and the mathematics behind it are all so similar that it really is one of those moments that's like we are all part of such a bigger picture of the.
I mean, what is it? We're all space dust.
And I love that. Like, I love that. That feels very humanizing in some ways. Like we're all. We're all made out of the same stuff. So let's treat each other well, treat our conditions so we live longer and can have more space dust.
So you talked about sort of neuromodulation as having a relationship with that kind of from the beginning, from your graduate program, your PhD program, to Abbott. Was that the next step or did you have other steps in between that?
[00:06:26] Speaker D: Yeah, so I took a couple steps. You know, retrospectively it always looks very linear, but I actually, when I joined my PhD, I was very much interested in neurotechnology, but didn't really know much about neuromodulation. But the lab that I ended up joining, they were focused on neuromodulation, specifically for neuromodulation for psychiatric indications.
And that's really how I got introduced to the field.
And then the more I learned about how we can use engineering technologies like computational modeling and imaging, it really kind of helped me grow within that field. So that was really the focus of my PhD that I did at Marquette University, really focused on computational modeling and imaging to understand how neuromodulation intervenes for depression. And then moving on from that, I really, and I did my PhD in a very engineering focused training, but I really was craving for more of a clinical experience as well. So I ended up doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University in the Department of Neurosurgery.
And over there, I actually did get to be in the. OR a little bit more.
You know, interface. You know, see firsthand that interface between technology and humans and was. It was an incredibly rewarding experience. And I do want to take a second to just give a shout out to both my PhD and my postdoc advisors, Chris Butson and Samir Shruth, who really trained me in this field and I think gave me a very interdisciplinary lens at this technology in terms of what is the potential of technology, but also what is the impact that we can really have on people who are going through these neurodegenerative chronic conditions.
So I think that holistic perspective then just left one more itch, which was to kind of see it be scalable and to really see how all of these thoughts and ideas can really translate into innovation at a much broader scale. And that's kind of what brought me to Abbott. And so I joined an RD and did some great work, worked on some really high impact solutions within brain therapies, as well as chronic pain. And then about two years ago, I joined my current role, which is within medical affairs.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: That's fantastic. And I love that you pointed out that it looks like a linear path, because if you look at your LinkedIn profile, I was looking at it prior to the interview and I was like, this person was like focused, like laser focused on this path.
And it's always, it's fascinating to have you say, you know, there was some doubt here and there and some discovery.
I think it's important for people to hear that. I think everyone thinks everyone else has it all figured out and we don't. I think we're all sort of packing as we go or unpacking as we go.
Let's get into a bit, into the overview of neuromodulation. As we talked, we talked about the start.
Both find the area fascinating. I've been enamored with it since the early neuropace days. And I saw you shaking your head when I recounted the neuropace story.
Give us a bit of an overview of the neuromodulation space.
Maybe just not too deep, but a little bit of its history, of its impact, maybe a sense of where we are today.
[00:09:43] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I think when we think about neuromodulation, it is such a fascinating and cool technology that it's hard to kind of accept that it's part of our daily life today. But really, neuromodulation, if you go back into history, it really began like in the Roman times when they were initially using electrical fish to treat. Treat headaches. So that's really as far back as we trace the human history of kind of experimenting with electrical stimulation and how it can have an impact on neurological conditions, I would say in the more modern times. And the way that we really get to practice neuromodulation today, you know, for the chronic pain therapies, the pivotal point was really in the 1960s when we got a better understanding of the gait control theory, which really helped us Understand how we process pain better.
And that really opened the doors to spinal cord stimulation, which is a widely accepted therapy and effective for chronic pain conditions.
Then, for movement disorders, the neuromodulation therapy that is typically used as deep brain stimulation.
And so deep brain stimulation really kind of rose to popularity in the 1980s. There were a lot of seminal studies done in the late 80s, and it really got approved for neuromodulation for movement disorders in the late 90s and early 2000s, specifically for Parkinson's disease and essential tremor.
When I think about this history, it really helps me understand how technologies really make their way into therapies. And I think part of it is a better understanding of the mechanisms of action of the things that we're trying to treat. And then part of it is just being able to have a measurable impact. And you kind of see that on the both sides of chronic pain conditions, where it was really a scientific understanding that kind of opened the door there.
And on the movement disorder side, there was already a history of understanding how lesion techniques can improve some of these conditions. And the ability to instantly see the improvement in behavior was really the catalyst here in bringing this kind of technology to a therapeutic space.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: You've identified a few of the principal areas that are treatable with neuromodulation.
Are there some that we not really aware of yet? I guess what I'm wondering is, are we really just limited to the areas that you've identified, or do you see a lot of green space or blue space or white space or whatever color space you want to make it where neuromodulation could be applied and could provide treatment?
[00:12:35] Speaker D: Yeah, I think that that's a great question, Tom.
I will say that we're currently indicated for these two conditions that I mentioned, these two spaces that I mentioned, Chronic pain conditions for spinal cord therapies, and then movement disorders, including Parkinson's disease and essential tremor for deep brain stimulation.
But I think you've kind of hit the nail right when we think about neuromodulation, at its core, it's really applying electrical pulses to the nervous system to modulate something that has gone awry. That's really the definition of neuromodulation. Right.
And the two therapies that we talked about are implantable therapies, and they're very specific, and they're very.
They kind of intervene at a very specific level. As we think about other indications out there, there is a lot of investigational work that's going on.
Abbott actually kicked off a study last Year called the Transcend Study, which is really investigating the use of deep brain stimulation for treatment resistant depression.
And so as we think about the overall impact that these technologies can make, there are wider applications. Most of them are still investigational.
But I think the future is really bright.
[00:13:54] Speaker C: We're going to take a really quick break from our conversation with Dr. Yagna Patek, Medical science Manager, Medical affairs at Abbott's Neuromodulation Business, to bring in our episode spons Sirtech Medical. Enjoy.
Brad Womble, Senior Director of Strategy for Sirtech Medical. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:14:13] Speaker E: Nice to meet you, Kayleen. Thank you for the invitation. Glad to be here.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: Oh really, it's going to be my pleasure. I promise you this, Brad. So for our audience, I always like to start at the 40,000 foot level. So for those who don't know who Sirtech Medical is, could you give us a brief overview? Who's Sir Tech Medical?
[00:14:32] Speaker E: Yeah, Certek.
We are a diversified medical device company. We primarily focus on both Class 2 as well as Class 3, which are implantable medical devices. And we're really focused on a couple of key areas. We're really focused in the neurology space in a place called neuromodulation, which is all about how to stimulate nerves, read nerves, that sort of thing. And then we're also really focused on the interventional therapy space. And that could be either neurovascular type products as well as cardio cardiovascular products, but all of them are more interventional. So they're going in your body, but then they're coming back out. But, but all of them generally are in sort of the higher order of magnitude in terms of advancement. So electrophysiology, structural heart, things of that nature are what we're kind of focused on at Sir Tech.
[00:15:24] Speaker C: Well, it's really helpful to understand some of the breadth and depth of your coverage. I know that I'd like to learn a bit more about your capabilities, but you caught my interest, Brad, when you said neuromodulation.
So I just had the pleasure of co hosting this episode of Abbott Talks where we talked through neuromodulation. And as a layperson in this space, I got a better understanding of, you know, really what that is.
Could you walk us through how Cirtech Medical like works within neuromodulation?
[00:15:56] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. So the beautiful thing about our business model is that we're really supporting the entire continuum of, of the industry. So we're really excited to work with the clinic. The people that are focused on the clinical trials, the ones that are actually doing the research with, you know, either bench tops or with animals or you know, with humans to figure out exactly how we can support and build a better device.
But we're also working with the small and medium sized and large size companies along that continuum as well. So depending upon what their needs are, depending upon what therapeutic areas, we can adjust the platform that we have in order to suit those different purposes. So we both have our own platform that can support all different types of neuromodulation applications to help give them a like start. You know, these. We would use the platform if the customer, whether it's the clinician or the company, wants to try to get to market, you know, sooner, faster, perhaps two to three years sooner, we could use our platform to support them. However, if they have a very custom type application, that's something that we can support them with as well, we could build that custom application for, for them. That journey might be a little bit longer though. I mean, typically it takes five to seven years to get a product from start to development within the neuromodulation space. So unfortunately it can take a little while. But if you can, if you can get a, you know, a head start, use a platform that, like what we have, that's already been on the market for a while, you know, that could save two to three years of effort and can be used for many different types of indications. So yeah, so we work across the spectrum from clinicians to large companies. And then the services we offer, you know, we're able to customize depending upon where their needs are at as well. But there's a lot of diversity within the neuromodulation space right now. It's a real exciting time.
[00:17:47] Speaker C: Can you help me understand your neuromodulation platform, Accel, and how that benefits the industry?
[00:17:54] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. The beautiful thing about AccelPlus, so Certek Medical, by our nature, we're a contract manufacturer, meaning we love working with companies to help manufacture their devices and to help think of ways of, of taking their devices to even the next level.
But one of the areas when we started our business is we're realizing that we have a lot of customers in the neuromodulation space that don't have their own platform. They have to develop their own platform, but they already have the therapy idea immediately. They already know how they want to use that device. But if it takes them seven years to go from initial conception all the way to production, I mean, that's seven years that, that therapy is not going to be in the market, and it's not going to be benefiting the patients that absolutely need it. So our thought process was, well, why don't we acquire a platform that's already been a medical device that already has gone through the FDA approval process and take that platform and open it up open source that to our customers so they can use that platform. And what we're finding is that in a lot of cases, it's two to three years of development time that are taken off the table. So, you know, we're taking development times from, say, five to seven years to, you know, three to four years, and in some cases a little bit less if we're able to show proven applications. But the beautiful thing about our platform is it could be used for deep brain stimulation, spinal cord stimulation, which are about 80% of of the market today, but also can be used for vagus nerve stimulation in your neck and other types of peripheral nerve stimulation as well.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: Thinking about in the next two to three years, you know, what are some examples or even in our, what we're. You're seeing now, what are some examples of neuromodulation products or even research that you've, you've seen and that you're excited about?
[00:19:43] Speaker E: Yeah, well, so a couple of the areas that we're touching are pretty exciting. There's a couple areas that we're not touching that, that, you know, I'd love to touch.
But what we're seeing is that we're seeing miniaturization within the neuromodulation space. So a lot of the, like our platform and other platforms, there's, you know, basically kind of like an IPG can. It's actually, I've got.
They're about this size. This is our Excel plus platform.
[00:20:10] Speaker C: So it fits in the palm of your hand.
[00:20:12] Speaker E: It does. And there's leads that come out from it that either are implanted in the spine or in the brain, but what's exciting is that they're starting to able to miniaturize these devices. And imagine having a complete IPG, a complete.1 of those things that I just showed you, but implanted in your body right next to your nerve. And imagine having, you know, a bunch of those little tiny sort of neurostimulators implanted all over, you know, all over the nerve that you're trying to target.
1. It miniaturizes it, it reduces, you know, the footprint. And, you know, the idea is that you're able to place those exactly where, where you need. So miniaturization of that technology is Going to be super exciting. We're already starting to see that. For deep brain, imagine tiny little, you know, sort of little rice, you know, little tiny rice samples that are kind of embedded in your brain in the right spot instead of actual leads and wires that are going down. But I'll tell you where it's going. And this is what's really exciting.
Nanobiology. Imagine that you're able to create little tiny nanobots that can resonate at a certain frequency. And imagine adding a little bit of iron, a little bit of ferritin, something that could attract a magnet. And let's say that I had a shoulder injury.
Now, imagine that your body safely had these nanobots kind of floating around in your body that could resonate at a specific frequency, and you attracted them using, say, like a little. Little mat or something that's covering your arm.
You could theoretically, you know, have your complete shoulder resonating at a certain frequency with these nanobots that could theoretically heal that part of your body and, you know, some sort of exponential way. Now, we're a ways off, you know, from that because obviously we have to get through the bioethics of that and so forth. But, I mean, that's the future. The future will be using nanotechnology to help heal our bodies, and that will be the neuromodulation of the future.
[00:22:08] Speaker C: I believe it's the future. But it goes right back to what you were just saying about the past and the architecture and the vibrations. It's sort of like it's parallel.
[00:22:18] Speaker E: Everything's about frequency, Everything's about frequency.
And it's. Yeah, it's really exciting, you know, on many different levels, it's exciting.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: Brad Womble, Senior Director of Strategy at Certech Medical. This has been one of the highlights of my week. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I loved learning more.
[00:22:43] Speaker E: My pleasure. And thank you for the invitation again.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: And that concludes my conversation with Brad Womble, Senior Director of Strategy for Surgic Medical. I know I learned a lot, and I hope that you did, too. And I wanted to say big thank you to Surgic Medical for sponsoring this episode of Abbott Talks. Without your support, we don't have the opportunity to tell these unquote incredible and important medtech stories. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And for our audience. If you want to learn more about Certik Medical and how they can help you engineer a new future for medical devices, please visit their
[email protected] that's c I r t e c m-e dash dot com. And now we bring you the conclusion of our conversation with Dr. Yagna Patek of Abbott's neuromodulation business.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Can you help us understand, for a layperson, the neuromodulations impact on the body itself? So you can choose, you know, however you want to go behind that, because I understand it, I think at the top level, but kind of the application, like, what, what are we expecting? Like, what's the impact on the body?
[00:23:45] Speaker D: So, you know, I mean, the, the, the fun thing about the nervous system that I really find fascinating is that it kind of, you know, it's a, it's an input. I'm an engineer at my course. I'm going to go into some engineering analogies here, please. The nervous system really is an input, output system, right? It takes signals from the outside world, and your peripheral nervous system really transmits them to the central nervous system, which is the spinal cord and the brain.
And then the brain and the spinal cord really process this information and then they tell the body how to react to these external signals, to these external stimuli. Right? That's really the, the role of the nervous system in, in our life. And thankfully, it's a very important role and, and one that is very critical to like, everyday living. Right. And quality of life.
When I think about, like, the impact to the body, I would say that, you know, anything and at any level, when we interface with the nervous system, we are impacted, impacting the body, because we're either impacting signals that are being received or we're impacting signals that are actually being transmitted. And so for something like pain, where we have spinal cord stimulation, it's a little bit of understanding, okay, these are abnormal signals that are bringing in the information about pain.
And it's not appropriate to have this reach the central nervous system or have this reach the brain, and then they get interrupted kind of midway. That's one of the ways that those signals get interrupted. And that's. I would say that the impact on the body is that it doesn't feel the pain because those signals got interrupted.
Similarly, when we think about movement disorders, it's a very behavioral condition.
You see tremor in patients that have Parkinson's or essential tremor. You might see shuffling, you might see abnormal gait, rigidity, etc. Also with these conditions and intervening at the nervous system level. So at the brain level, specifically for these disorders of the, you know, the movement disorders with deep brain stimulation, when you're interrupting those signals at that level, the downstream impact really is that you're correct for These.
For these abnormal behaviors, these hyperactive behaviors like tremors. So that's when you kind of think about this, like, input output system, which I, you know, I hope that analogy makes sense, but that's how I think about it. As an engineer, you're really impacting both how that information is processed by the nervous system, but also how that process processed information then turns into some instructions back for the body, which then helps you kind of correct for these conditions.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: That makes me think about data and, like, input of data and output of data and how you can interrupt the input or interrupt the output. So that really, I think that analogy makes perfect sense.
Thinking of data also brought me to sort of connectivity.
So we know that one of the advantages for advancements and for no treatment is connectivity. How does that help patients?
[00:27:01] Speaker D: Yeah, so when we're talking about connected care, we're talking about technologies like our Neurosphere digital platform, which was a pioneering technology in terms of connecting patients and physicians through remote technology. And so we worked on this technology starting in 2019, and it was released in 2021 when it was really important, as you were at the peak of the pandemic at that time. And when I think about the connectivity of this kind of technology, it's really based on kind of the patient experience.
We're dealing with disorders that are incredibly burdensome, incredibly debilitating, and whatever we can do to kind of make the experience a little bit better for these patients and to make sure that they're receiving care in a timely fashion, those are the two most important things. Beyond clinical benefit, which we know we can get with these neuromodulation therapies. The two biggest things that we can try to. Try to fix here is, you know, making this less burdensome for the patient and making sure that they have access to care exactly when they need access to care. So with the kind of path connected care technologies that we. That we have, the Neurosphere virtual clinic platform, as well as the new Neurosphere digital health app that we just released about, you know, six. Six weeks ago. I think with both of those kind of technologies, the goal really is to make sure that patients can connect with their physicians. Patients have access to information exactly when they need it, and, you know, and they get care in a timely. In a timely manner.
And overall, you're just trying to improve their experience a little bit more. We actually had a study that just came out earlier this year called the ROAM study that did show that access to these kind of technologies actually does help patients get to improvement of symptoms much faster, which kind of speaks to the impact that these technologies are really having in kind of accelerating the pace of, of therapeutic response and overall helping these patients stabilize a lot sooner.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: I just wanted to sort of. I think that's a great point about the power that connectivity gives to medical devices, because we can talk about the therapeutic benefits, but if they're not applied and if patients aren't following up, and if physicians don't have the information they need to make sure the energy is being applied correctly, then you're only.
You're not even halfway there, I think. Speak, if you would, just a little more about how this connectivity really elevates these devices to be merely from. Merely unfair, from devices that provide some therapeutic value to tools that patients can use and really become a better part of their recovery.
[00:29:52] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we, you know, as I mentioned, that our goal really is to kind of innovate in a patient centric manner. And so when we, you know, when we were thinking about, okay, your neuromodulation therapies work, what can we do? What can we do here to make this better?
What we learned is that, you know, there are many, many patients who could benefit from neuromodulation therapies right now who don't actually have access to it because either they don't know enough about it, they just, you know, the biggest barrier is education and awareness, or they just don't have access to a specialist because of geography, because of lifestyle, because of, you know, of just any other socioeconomic barriers that there might exist. And so we kind of took both of these, you know, gaps that we currently have in the field and thought about how can we use innovation to really bridge that. And so I think the biggest innovation really here is to make sure that as we're applying these therapies, we're doing it in a, in a very secure way. So a lot of the, A lot of the initial effort when we were developing Neurosphere was really on making sure that we were compliant with data privacy and cybersecurity practices. We made sure that we had multiple, multiple layers to kind of protect the data that was, that was being transferred to, through this system so that the patients and the physician would feel more comfortable and more secure while they were interfacing with this. But we also made sure that this was easy, right? So like our virtual clinic platform that I talked about a little bit, it's initiated by the patient. It's a one click on the patient's side, so they're always in Control kind of of their therapy, but they also have the ability to access their physician kind of when there is a need, when the problem arises, versus kind of having to wait, you know, six weeks, eight weeks, months, sometimes at a time.
The other module that I talked about, you know, our Neurosphere digital health app, which includes a module called My Health Journey, which is really focused on education and awareness. We recognize that that was another barrier. Right. A lot of times, you know, we, when we think of ourselves as, as patients, if we're dealing with something, we just never know where to start. We don't know what resources exist, and we never really know how to kind of navigate this journey. And this was an effort really on helping kind of streamline that as well for something that might already be very debilitating and confusing. So with this additional module in this app that we just released recently, the goal is to kind of allow patients to get access to resources, but also have access to other patients so that they can hear other patient stories, testimonials, and then have real time assistance as well. So a lot of this was really meant to be kind of holding the patient's hand and making sure that you're serving as a companion with them as they kind of navigate this process, which is incredibly difficult for a lot of them.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: So what I'm hearing is that Neurosphere is solving some challenges like access to information, that education. You're talking about the trust that's needed when you're given your information. So the trust for privacy.
This is absolutely, I think, integral to the patient journey.
Do you have any examples of maybe a patient story where it was particularly touched you or you found it to be successful?
[00:33:33] Speaker D: Yeah. So I will, I will share a story that's actually a little bit personal to me.
So, you know, we've, we've been talking about Virtual Clinic and Neurosphere.
When we were actually developing this, I was in R D and I was the lead scientist for our pilot study that we did. And we actually did the pilot study in Australia.
And I got to go down there, beautiful country, wonderful people. And I got to go down there and enroll patients initially for the study. And our very first patient on that study was also the very first patient to get the commercialized version of our Neurosphere Virtual Clinic when we released in Australia.
And within, you know, just within hours after he had access to this, he requested, you know, you know, to our team in Australia to have a conversation, to have a virtual conversation, you know, virtual call with the R and D team in the US because he wanted to share just how much of an impact this technology had made on his life and to kind of paint the picture and pun totally intended.
This patient is an artist. He really enjoyed woodworking. He really enjoyed kind of doing a lot of things with his hands.
And neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, as a therapy, was already helping him kind of manage those symptoms.
But he also moved about four hours away from his movement disorders, neurologists in the middle of the pandemic. And so it was an incredibly difficult, you know, challenge for him to actually access his neurologist exactly when he needed it.
His, you know, his family would have to take some time off to help him kind of make his way to the neurologist's office.
And he wanted to really, you know, call us. And he kind of showed us, like, what, you know, the four hours one way. So. So eight hours total time that he actually got back. He actually showed us a painting that he had painted that day, basically showing us that look, you've kind of given me back eight hours of my time, eight hours of my life. And I can actually use that time to do the things that really matter to me.
I can live my life. I don't have to think about my therapy.
I don't have to think about the logistics of reaching my care provider, because when I need something, I can. I can schedule that, you know, in a very timely fashion, and I can get care without having to kind of just go through hoops, you know, just to. Just to get my. My therapy adjusted. So it's still one of. One of the most touching experiences from working on this technology that I have, and one that I hold very close. I think, you know, maybe you guys are aware. Neurosphere, our virtual clinic, won a lot of different accolades, you know, because of how innovative and creative this technology was. But this. This account, when. When this patient called us and really wanted to thank us for how much we had impacted his life, I think that meant more to us. Just seeing how much of an impact we had on his life.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: That's. That's an amazing. Yeah, an amazing metric to.
To the. Some. To. To the.
Whatever you gave back to that person's life just to have them to show that piece of art that they created with that time. It's just outstanding.
So we're. We're at an exciting point today.
We're seeing a lot of fabulous technologies being created today.
Looking forward, looking 10 years ahead of now. What do you see happening? Where do you see connected care sort of taking us? And where do we see neuromodulation headed?
[00:37:16] Speaker D: Yeah. You know, I actually love the promise of the future here, right. With neural technology, I feel like we have learned so much in, you know, in the last, you know, 30 years of, you know, of this field having matured. Right. We've learned so much in the last 30 years and I just cannot, I feel like, you know, when we think about the future, I know you're asking about where does this field go in like 10 years, but I think we're at such an accelerated pace of innovation right now that I think year on year you're going to see something incredibly different and incredibly powerful.
I feel like the field of neurotechnology still has a lot of unknowns as well, even though we've learned so much about it, but it is full of potential.
I also think there's a lot to learn from it. Right. So a lot of our modern day technology is built on kind of the foundation of brain's unparalleled computing power from, from things like transistors to AI.
Our understanding of nervous system has really kind of inspired these innovations. And now I think it's time to take these innovations and kind of iterate back, right?
Using things like AI, using things like digital health, you know, applications, wearables, stuff like that. I think we really have the opportunity to understand more about, you know, how we can continue to improve, improve symptoms and conditions for a lot of these people who are, who are living with neurodegenerative diseases. But also as we, as this technology matures, as we have better ways of imaging people, as we have better computing power, as we have better ways of imaging, miniaturizing this technology and bringing it so that it's seamless and real time, right. With things that we've, that we've already talked about, things like Connected Care, which does offer the opportunity for real time assessments, for more holistic assessments. As we bring in more, you know, concepts of AI into this, what we can really offer patients is seamless, timely, you know, interventions, but also the ability for wider application. Right. I know I talked about depression a little bit earlier, but as you know, when we think about our mission as avid, our goal is to be able to serve and help as many people as we can. And when we think about the potential for neural technology, I think this kind of innovation that we've been seeing, especially with connected technologies and digital, digital health and AI, I think what it's really going to do is it's really going to help us scale these technologies so that we can really bring it also to indications that have a public health magnitude. So when I think about the future of neural technology and neuromodulation specifically within this, to me, I'm really excited about what we've learned so far, but I'm actually more excited about what we're about to learn because of all the tools that we have at our disposal now and how we can really leverage them to just improve the quality of life, to just, you know, give someone else control back of their time and, you know, so that they don't really have to think about just the burden of their disease or the burden of their therapy and they can really live a seamless, normal life.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: There's so much agna to look forward to and I can hear see your passion and excitement and certainly share that with you. We kind of joked at the beginning, you know, medtech industry is the best industry in the world. One of us, one of us. As a last thought for those maybe who are looking to get into neuromodulation, why neuromod? Why is that something that we should get more in medtech?
[00:40:59] Speaker D: Yeah, I think neuromodulation is amazing. I think it's the coolest thing in the world.
And I love it because kind of like I said, you know, I think everything that we do, every thought that we have, every action that we take, it really is connected to our nervous system. And when things are not working as they should be in the nervous system, it can be incredibly debilitating. I've seen that firsthand with a lot of these patients that we serve. And I've seen the patient power of this technology.
I just think that, you know, the brain and the spinal cord are incredibly complex, but they're incredibly critical to just having a happy, healthy life. And if we can create the technologies that can interface at these levels to keep people happy and healthy, to make sure that they can get happy and healthy, I think that that's really the motivation behind why neuromodulation is a field that people should choose.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: You're here.
Dr. Yagna Patek, medical science manager of medical affairs for Abbott's neuromodulation business. Thank you so much for joining us on Abbott Talks. It was a thrill to sit down with you.
[00:42:16] Speaker D: Thank you so much, Kaylee. Thank you so much, Tom. It was lovely to have this conversation with you. And yeah, looking forward to. Forward to a bright future in neuromodulation.
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
Well, that is a wrap, Kaylene Brown. This is our second time together on Abbott Talks. It was A lot of fun. Thank you for. I don't know. Thank you for agreeing to be on a call with me for 45 minutes.
[00:42:39] Speaker C: Well, I mean, it does ask a lot of me, so I understand.
No, really, Are you kidding me? This is my favorite part of my job. Favorite part of this industry is getting to sit in the passion with those who are on the other side of the camera. And actually, after we hung up after the podcast recording, Yagna and I had a brief exchange about how we're both so passionate about the industry and how we're trying to get more people in our space and bringing right back to the one of us. One of us. Like, I really do believe in that, you know, I want more.
The more people we can get as part of this incredible industry, the faster and further innovation is going to go, and it's going to help more patients, and it's just. It's the best industry in the world. So I'm riding a high from this conversation. It was such a joy. Thanks for having me.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, now it's great fun. And of course, it wouldn't be possible without our sponsor, Surtech Medical, and we're really happy to have their story told here as well. We cannot do these amazing podcasts without the support of fine folks like Surtech Medical, so thank you to them for being part of this.
My hopeful takeaway, I think, is just the connectivity element of what we're talking about, just to see neuromodulation treatments becoming more complete, becoming more, I think, part of a person's lives, becoming more of a useful tool for them, as opposed to just, as we kind of said up top, just a cool outcome that comes from the delivery of energy to the body.
I feel like we're really taking a huge step forward for neuromodulation and for Medtech.
[00:44:15] Speaker C: And the other thing about neuromodulation is that it's not just a figurative step forward, but it can be a literal step forward, and that's really exciting.
So everything from pain management to Parkinson's, I mean, the opportunities are really limitless. And I think Yagna really walked us through what we can look forward to in the near future, what she's personally looking forward to, and definitely what I'm looking forward to. It was a great conversation all around.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's why we're doing these podcasts. And really thankful to Yagna for sharing her story on the podcast as well. So, Kayleen, this is great. Let's do it again. What do you say?
[00:44:50] Speaker C: Done and done. Anytime you'll allow me to share this stage. There's nowhere else I'd rather be. And for our audience, if you'd like, and you will allow us the opportunity to continue to tell these MedTech stories, please follow Device Talks Podcast network on every major podcast player. You can also follow Abbott Talks as a show on all of your favorite podcast players. Follow us on YouTube, and of course, connect with us on LinkedIn. I'm Kayleen Brown, Managing Editor for Device Talks.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: And I'm Tom Salami, Editorial Director. Yes, please connect with us on LinkedIn. We'd love to follow your MedTech stories.
Take care everybody. Thanks for joining us.
[00:45:37] Speaker D: Sam.
