Treating cancer remains a crude practice. We cut, burn and poison tumors, and we do all this with relatively little precision around both the initial treatment and our ongoing monitoring of how effective the treatment is. You show up for scans now and again and hope that whatever you’ve been doing has been working.
Ben Woodington - who is an absolute unit - and the team at Coherence have come up with a new way to monitor and treat tumors. They’ve built an implant that, as the name suggests, gets placed inside the body to keep a constant watch on a tumor’s behavior. The chip also brings with it the ability to deliver electrical signals that may blunt a tumor’s growth. We’re talking constant monitoring of a tumor to see if treatments are working and the ability to read and write electrical signals as part of a totally novel bio-tech device.
In this episode, Ben explains how this technology works and, more broadly, he walks us through the emerging field of neuro-oncology or cancer neuroscience. We have a look at Coherence’s device, which is reminiscent of Neuralink’s implant, and rival technology.
Since we recorded this episode, Coherence has begun a study in Australia where its device is being used to record and stimulate brain activity in patients having brain tumors removed. The company has also put out a paper detailing some of its work and has brought on Neuralink’s neurosurgery lead Matthew MacDougall as an advisor and investor.
This episode was a treat for me because I had no idea this type of technology even existed, and because Coherence seems to have made a remarkable amount of progress on its hardware in a short time.
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Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)
0:00 Intro
3:54 Cut It, Poison It, Burn It. Is There a Fourth Way?
6:16 Your Tumor Is Rewiring Your Brain
8:29 The Clunky Device That Somehow Already Works
11:35 Why Patients Take It Off
15:12 Inside the Implant: A Neuralink for Tumors
20:32 Could a Chip Replace the MRI?
27:13 What the Mice Are Already Telling Them
31:38 First Humans, and Why It's Always Australia
35:36 "They Should Have Hired a Few Apple Engineers"
43:24 Neuralink vs ONWARD: Who's Right About the Spine?
47:09 The Idea Nobody Else in Neurotech Had
1:01:45 Cut One Nerve and the Cancer Stops Spreading
1:06:12 A Cancer Sensor Inside All of Us?
1:09:12 Do Cancer Drugs Work Better Before 11 a.m.?
1:14:59 If AI Ran Medicine, It Would Build This
