“We want to make an impact on the world we live in.” For sure everyone of us has a dream like this once in a while. However, Marcos Fortunato and Bankim Chander from PAINSOL have an actual three-year plan to achieve that. So let’s have a look at the base of a big idea!
Reforming the way we think
Bankim Chander and Marcos Fortunato are developing a new last resort treatment for chronic neuropathic pain and thereby bring hope to a quarter billion people worldwide. In the MedTech Startup School 2015 they met the reality of being entrepreneurs and realized that they had to give themselves more time.
We were happy to welcome you at the Open MedTech Innovation Day in February. How was your experience?
Marcos: We want the participants to feel the same excitement as we did and we would like to pass on that feeling. It is a good chance for them to try something new.
Bankim: When we were part of the Summer School we met a lot of awesome people. It feels like being part of a new family here in Tübingen. I was not expecting this kind of experience. We did not only get what we needed but much more – we were making new contacts, closer relationships and had a good time.
Marcos and Bankim visiting the Open MedTech Innovation Day 2016
What is the most important thing you took from the Summer School programme?
Bankim: There are so many ideas but only one out of ten succeeds. Why? Because people don’t really know how to come from the idea to the actual impact. And this is what the Summer School was all about. In the end we learned how to pitch, how to make a financial model, how to make a business plan, how to do the services – we learned everything we need to build a successful company. In programmes like this the big picture often gets lost but not in the Summer School. Marcos and me always had a goal and we got all the help we needed to make this dream come true. This is what I would say was the best experience: I had to make my ideas work in a way which can be translated into something meaningful and make an impact on the world we live in.
Marcos: I have a more emotional perspective. For me the most important thing about the Summer School was the excitement of putting crazy ideas into a project that may become reality. It allowed me to forget about boundaries so I could think out of the box. In the Summer School my inspiration came from people who challenge commonsense knowledge. We all try to implement something that at first sounds ridiculous or not achievable. But in the end some of our concepts will change the world.
Painsol pitching at Demo Day in October 2015
So what are your next steps to change the world?
Bankim: I can break our timeline down to three years. The plan for the ongoing year is to collect data, analyse it and create an intelligent stimulation algorithm out of it. We have these awesome patients who help us in our endeavor. They let us implant a spinal cord stimulator so they receive electric stimulation. We record from the spinal cord to find out what’s wrong with the patients and what signals are actually related to their pain.
By the end of the year we can most likely apply for a patent. Actually, we wanted to do that right in the beginning but meanwhile we found out that it is not possible to patent a medical treatment according to the European patent law. So we figured out how to overcome this problem by developing a unique stimulation algorithm: We will be using light for the stimulation of the nervous system.
What is going to happen in the second and third year?
Bankim: Based on the findings from the first year we will develop a method using light as the energy for stimulation. Then we will develop an intelligent algorithm which will actually stimulate based on the signals we want to change in the spinal cord.
The third year will be essential for doing clinical trials. I will get all the paperwork done so that we will be allowed to test it with real patients. And by the end of the third year we want to launch the product in the market.
That sounds quite well-established.
Marcos: It sounds reasonable because when we started the Summer School we thought this would be more straightforward. But as we all know knowledge brings problems. The more we became aware of the steps that are necessary the more we realised that we had to slow down and make a more realistic plan.
It seems like Marcos is touring through the whole world visiting conferences and giving presentations. Which were the most important ones?
Marcos: I would say that there are two major achievements we made since the end of the Summer School. First of all Bankim and me have been invited to the 7th Laser Talks Conference in Rome in November 2015. There we presented our research in front of the main pain groups in Europe. That was quite an achievement because being invited when you are on a PhD level is not very usual. It was a very interesting experience. Then, in December, I was at the 19th Annual Meeting of the American Neuromodulation Society in Las Vegas. There I presented all my research and received good feedback from the faculty. Concerning this year I’m looking forward to attend the European Pain School in Siena in June. I have been selected among many competitors, so it is really something cool.
Marcos at the 19th Annual Meeting of the American Neuromodulation Society in Las Vegas
What does that conference touring mean for painsol?
Marcos: I go to a lot of conferences in order to see the latest developments and publications. They show me where the market is going and that helps us to push forward our own idea. We want to be ahead of the latest news because we want to present something that is not yet out there. I hope it will be as good or even better than the current technology.
Bankim: Marcos is going to these awesome conferences and thereby playing the Grand Ambassador for painsol. He gets to know the latest happenings in the world of spinal cord stimulation for relieving pain and then he gets back to me with all sorts of new ideas that we can implement in our product. And my job is to use these ideas and put them into perspectives. In the end I try to understand how spinal cord stimulation would actually help with the new form of stimulation we use with painsol and make the best product we can.
Marcos at the MedTec Europe in Stuttgart
That sounds like very good teamwork.
Bankim: We like to stick together :)
Marcos: We complement because the medical and the engineering sides of our project are equally important. To have both combined with an open-minded perspective offers us a lot of different ways to see how it can be implemented. That means that I listen to Bankim’s engineering and science perspective and he listens to my crazy ideas which mostly do not sound reasonable in first place. But together we can get something out of this stuff and make a valid proposition which will actually be implemented. That’s the way we function as a team.
Bankim: The good thing is that Marcos is unlike other neurosurgeons who just implant and don’t really care about how it works. Marcos is actually interested in how we can improve the existing technology. And this puts him into a very unique situation with me because this way we form a good team. Marcos is looking into what’s latest in the field and I’m trying to understand the underlying mechanisms of pain relief. We put these things together and complement each other.
Thank you for the interview and good luck for the next years!
Bankim Chander and Marcos Fortunato from PAINSOL
© Juliane Pohl / Eva Oswald / Marcos Fortunato