Parkinson's wearables - money counts
The great divide between the US and Europe in funding healthtech
“VCs just aren’t interested in Parkinson’s” - that lament from a conversation a while back with the founder of a European healthtech startup came to mind this week after I talked to two excellent businesses that have managed to get funding. They are both developing wearable technology to measure the progression of Parkinson’s disease and are proof that there is money for bright ideas in this field - there’s just a hell of a lot more of it in the United States than in Europe.
First, let’s look at PDNeurotechnology, headquartered in London (Europe’s main centre for VC funding) but founded in 2015 by a team of Greek neurologists and engineers with a special interest in wearable technology. They have developed a system called PDMonitor, which consists of five sensors, one strapped on each limb, one worn on your belt, and what’s called a SmartBox. This acts both as a charger for the. sensors and as the connected device sending your data to the cloud where it can be accessed by medical staff
“The signals that are recorded by the devices that you wear are converted into symptoms using algorithms incorporated into the Smart Box,“ explains George Boukouris, a London-based consultant who has helped the founders commercialise their work which has come from years of research in Greece.
Patients wear the sensors for between three and five days a month, allowing doctors to assess how they are responding to medication or in some cases to monitor them before a deep brain stimulation operation. The innovation here is in developing the algorithms to quantify Parkinson’s symptoms, engineering the sensor kit and creating different dashboards to display the data to both the neurologists and their patients.
It is an expensive business which seems to be paying off - the PDMonitor has been deployed in Greece and is now being used by a handful of NHS patients in the UK. Taking it further will require more capital and PDNeurotechnology is in the middle of a Series A investment round aimed at raising between £3m and £5m.
Our second example is Rune Labs, founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Brian Pepin, an engineer who has a track record of innovative work in brain/machine interfaces, latterly at Verily, a healthtech company owned by Alphabet.
In just three and a half years it too has brought to market a system for remote monitoring of Parkinson’s patients. It is called StrivePD and is described boldly on the company’s website as “the next generation of Parkinson’s care.” But unlike PDNeurotechnology it has not developed its own wearables, opting instead to use the Apple Watch.
Other companies I’ve spoken to in this sector say they have steered clear of Apple’s and other consumer wearables because they are power hungry and simply too much trouble to turn into regulated medical devices. Brian Pepin begs to differ: “The level of validation that Apple has done - and we've pushed this along in terms of Parkinson's and dyskinesia symptoms in particular - is orders of magnitude better than anything anyone else has been able to do.”
He also believes that a device like the Apple Watch which a patient wears constantly means the whole process of tracking symptoms is less fuss:”You don't really have to change your lifestyle, most of the data that comes off it, we get off passively.”
Like the Greek company, Rune Labs has got its platform into the hands of clinicians and patients - StrivePD is in around 20 US hospitals and the company says it is coming to Europe soon. But the big difference is the capital available to the US company. In its short life, Rune has already raised around $30m from investors and has also signed a commercial deal with one of the world’s biggest medical technology companies.
And Brian Pepin is thinking big. He says if someone invents a drug that can cure Parkinson’s or prevent it “that would be a $10 billion a year drug.” Because he believes his platform would be instrumental in providing the data to help deliver such a drug he says Rune Labs might earn as much as 10% of that.
George Boukouris is realistic about this funding gap between Europe and the US: “There's nothing fair about raising capital and there’s certainly nothing easy about it if you're a Greek company.” But he is also now seeking out investment from what he describes as “North Americans who have proper money.” Maybe those European venture capitalists who have been shunning Parkinson’s projects need to wake up before it is too late.