From Lab to Clinic: How NeuroBionics Is Redefining Neuromodulation

As neurotechnology enters a new era of clinical promise and public interest, much of the spotlight has focused on brain-computer interfaces from major players like Neuralink and Synchron — but beyond the brain lies an equally compelling frontier: the peripheral nervous system, and with it, new opportunities to treat inflammation, cardiovascular dysfunction, and neurological disorders in less invasive, more adaptable ways.

At the center of this shift is NeuroBionics, a Boston-based startup developing evStim — a groundbreaking neural interface built from hair-thin, flexible bioelectronic fibers. These multifunctional devices can simultaneously record and stimulate electrical, chemical, and optical activity, supporting a new generation of tools for both research and clinical care. Their initial focus? Redefining how we deliver neuromodulation in both the brain and the peripheral nervous system by building an endovascular platform that can reach neuromodulation targets through the vasculature — with no open surgery required.

In this exclusive interview, Nicolette Driscoll, Co-Founder and CTO of NeuroBionics, shares her journey from academic research to entrepreneurship, the challenges of bringing advanced materials into the clinic, and how her team is setting a new standard for minimally invasive neuromodulation.

By Carter Sciences

NeuroBionics’ evStim endovascular neural interface.

Hi Nicki, great to meet you! I’d love for you to tell us a bit about your journey into neurotechnology and your company, NeuroBionics.

By way of introduction and a little bit of background on myself and about NeuroBionics: I’m a biomedical engineer by training. I’ve been working in the neuro devices space for a little over 10 years now, primarily in the academic world. I did my undergraduate degree at Brown University, and that’s where I first got introduced to BCI and neurotechnology. I had the great fortune to be mentored by Leigh Hochberg, who later demonstrated the first wireless BCI, so I got my feet wet in neuroengineering, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I wanted to keep working in that space.

I always had an inclination towards engineering. I come from a family of engineers, and I was definitely a science and math nerd growing up. I think my first flavor of this was high school biology, learning about the brain for the first time. I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s so fascinating”. Also, I was really interested about how much we still didn’t know and understand about the brain.

When I started as an undergraduate at Brown, I planned to study biomedical engineering, but I started taking neuroscience classes too because I was also really interested in neuro. Funnily enough, I didn’t know when I decided to attend Brown as an undergrad, that Brown was one of the pioneers of BCI work. I didn’t know what BCI was at the time. I remember I took the intro to neuroscience class, and they showed this video of a woman giving herself a drink with a BCI-controlled robotic arm, and I was like “Wow! That’s what I want to do”. That was kind of the “aha!” moment for me, because I had this natural pull toward engineering and I was also really interested in learning more about the brain, so neuroengineering felt like the perfect field to put those interests together.

I decided I wanted to work on technology and engineering focused on the brain, especially because there’s such a huge clinical need. There are so many neurological and neurodegenerative disorders that still don’t have good treatments, and a lot of that is because we still don’t understand those disorders as well as we should. I was really interested in building tools to help users learn more about those disorders and potentially even treat them.

That ultimately led me to doing a PhD in Bioengineering at Penn, focusing on how we make new types of soft and flexible electrodes and sensors for the brain and the body. When I first started working in this space and got my intro to BCI, the Utah array was really the state of the art and I thought to myself, “This bed of nails cannot be the best that we can do”. So I spent a lot of time really thinking about how we make soft, flexible electrode arrays for both recording and stimulation by leveraging new materials and new fabrication methods. Towards the end of my time at Penn, I actually had some interest in starting a company along with a few of my mentors to spin out one of the new electrode technologies we had developed. For various reasons, we didn’t quite have the right combination of product-market fit, right people, right place, right mentorship, to decide to spin out the company — but I spent a lot of time learning about entrepreneurship and thinking about what it would take to start a company. Instead, I ended up doing a postdoc at MIT in Prof. Polina Anikeeva’s lab, thinking that I’d pursue a career in academia. It turned out I was still feeling the pull toward entrepreneurship and clinical translation, though, and it was while working at MIT that I met my now co-founder, Marc-Joseph ‘MJ’ Antonini.

MJ and I were working together as postdocs in Polina’s lab, on a really interesting technology and method: A way to make these very thin, flexible fiber devices that can incorporate lots of different functionalities. We can include microelectrodes for recording and stimulation, microfluidic channels for localized drug delivery, and optical waveguides for optical neuromodulation and recording. Pretty much from the moment I joined the lab and started working with MJ on these devices, he had this inclination:

“Hey, I really want to spin this out into a startup. I want to take this mature technology that we’ve developed over the past 10 years in this lab and actually translate it into the clinic. It’s currently being used as a neuroscience tool, and that’s great, but, we really want to have clinical impact and go beyond just publishing cool papers, right?”

It didn’t take much convincing on his part to get me excited to join forces and start NeuroBionics.

NeuroBionics Co-Founders MJ Antonini (L) and Nicolette Driscoll (R).

We started NeuroBionics in Spring 2023 after working together on the tech for about two years, but we stayed at MIT as postdocs through the end of that year. We went full time on NeuroBionics in January 2024 and since then we’ve really been off to the races.

We’ve done a bunch of different startup accelerators and incubators, which have been incredibly useful. Most notably was the MedTech Innovator program that we participated in last year, which is an excellent, excellent program for medical device startups. We built a great network of fellow MedTech founders through that program. We’ve grown NeuroBionics to six full time employees as well as a number of consultants and part-time folks. We’re in the pre-clinical stage right now, so we’re doing a lot of testing of our device in animals, and that’s going quite well.

That’s an amazing journey. It feels almost fatalistic having worked with the technology for so long before deciding to set up NeuroBionics.

It’s great to see so much innovation in the space from both a scientific and engineering perspective. With so much focus on BCIs and the core group of major players, what has been your main focus to differentiate NeuroBionics?

Rather than a pure BCI company, we’re focusing on building a bidirectional neuromodulation platform — what some might consider a ‘therapeutic BCI’ company. Recently, the big players in the BCI space, who have been building really innovative tech, have been driving growing interest in the neurotech space, and that’s buoying the whole field and investment in the space, which is great for everyone — for neurotech founders, and ultimately for patients.

To tell you how we’re differentiated from other BCI companies, let me tell you a bit more about the device we’re building: We have these very thin fiber-based devices. When we set out to start NeuroBionics, we spent a lot of time thinking about what we could we do with these ultra-thin, flexible devices. What we landed on — through a lot of conversations with physicians — was that our technology was uniquely suited for use in the endovascular space: You can navigate these tiny fibers through catheters, through blood vessels that twist and turn and access hard-to-reach places. So, we decided we were going to work on an endovascular neuromodulation device. It’s Synchron-esque, except focused primarily on therapeutic neuromodulation. We really have this unique opportunity to develop our technology as a platform for neuromodulation across the body through less invasive means.

NeuroBionics’ evStim interfaces with the nervous system via blood vessels. .

Our technology does not restrict us to focusing only on the brain or only on the periphery: Blood vessels travel all over the body, from the deepest nuclei in the brain to those running alongside nerves, providing nutrients to those nerves. We are building a platform that enables both deep brain stimulation (DBS) from inside blood vessels without open brain surgery, and neuromodulation of peripheral nerve targets without open cut-down surgeries. In the periphery, we’ve looked at a number of interesting targets that lend themselves well to an endovascular neuromodulation approach, including splenic and vagus nerve stimulation for modulating inflammation and sympathetic tone, hypoglossal nerve stimulation for obstructive sleep apnea, and sacral nerve stimulation for various forms of incontinence.

Interesting! So while you’re focusing on the technology, you’re still honing in on the first indication you want to target. Tell me a bit more about where you’re currently at from a clinical perspective?

We’ve been working in a pig model, and so far we’ve been able to deploy our device and demonstrate effective neuromodulation in several different targets. We’ve stimulated in the brain, we’ve paced the diaphragm via phrenic nerve stimulation, we’ve modulated blood pressure by stimulating the stellate ganglion, and we’ve shown effective vagus nerve stimulation. One of the main things we’re focusing on right now is the hemocompatibility of our device — investigating different potential surface treatments and coatings to reduce thrombus risk (blood clotting), and we’ve had some great results there.

What does the future hold for you? Where do you see NeuroBionics going over the next 12 to 24 months?

We have some pretty ambitious goals over the next 12 to 24 months. The biggest milestone we’re targeting is to do a small-scale first-in-human / early feasibility study to show safety and target engagement. Our goal is to show that we can safely deploy our device endovascularly and stimulate our intended target in these patients for a period of about an hour as an early demonstration of safety and feasibility. As we look ahead to that big goal, we have a lot of goals in the coming months for hitting a design freeze, passing biocompatibility testing, and setting up manufacturing. We’re also preparing for a Q-submission (early regulatory sumbission guidance and feedback) meeting with the FDA.

With neurotech receiving a lot of public attention — with Elon Musk garnering much attention, whether positive or negative! — and the wearable / non-invasive market being more accessible than ever to the general public, what do you think the future holds for neurotech?

I’m so excited to see how things unfold over the coming years, because I think we’re really on the brink of a huge revolution in neurotech with so many new technologies coming out. Elon Musk and Neuralink have been divisive, and I certainly have my concerns about some of the things that they’ve done and the speed with which they’ve progressed. However, they’ve brought so much attention to the field which has driven investment, and I think that’s fantastic, and it has really poised neurotech to take off.

Having come from an academic background, there’s so much innovation that’s happened in the academic world over the last few years that just hasn’t translated yet, and I think that we’re on the brink of starting to see some of those innovations finally getting translated for clinical use. Case in point, I spent a lot of my academic career working on novel carbon electrode materials. Pretty much all of our implantable neuromodulation devices and BCIs still use traditional metallic electrodes, because even though some of these newer materials have advantages, no one has wanted to take on the burden of bringing a novel electrode material through regulatory bodies like the FDA in the US and the Medical Device Regulation in the EU, and going through all the rigor to show that those materials are safe and stable. But, we’re finally starting to see some of the innovations from academia making their way into the clinic with companies like INBRAIN Neuroelectronics in Spain, which is building graphene-based arrays. I really think we’re sitting on this precipice of a lot of new innovation finally coming out, and that’s been driven by this increased excitement, hype, and public perception of neurotech that has driven investment and lifted the whole field up.

It’s a very exciting time, but of there’s certainly a degree of caution that comes with this rapid innovation. There are so many companies trying to build in this space right now, and it really only takes one bad mistake — say a patient dies from a malfunctioning device — for public perception to shift. So, while all this innovation is super exciting, we also need to work together as a field to make sure that everyone who’s pushing the boundaries is doing so in a way that’s really rigorous and puts patient safety first.

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