Public Funding for Amber Therapeutics Ltd

Neurological conditions are the leading cause of disability and the second cause of deaths worldwide. Monitoring and treating these diseases is incredibly difficult as targets are encased in thick bone and special membranes in the circulatory system block many drugs. Advanced neural implants, comprising electronics placed inside the skull or spine, are an exciting technology that could revolutionise our understanding of the brain and treat associated conditions---enabling people to walk again; children to hear for the first time; or relieving the symptoms of epilepsy or Parkinson's disease. However, such devices require complex electronics with tight constraints on size and power, whilst also complying with the most stringent regulatory requirements (Active Implantable Medical Devices). As a result, implants can take years and hundreds of millions of pounds to develop---a major barrier and risk for innovators, investors, and small-medium sized companies. Our vision is to create a set of modular chips (or microchips) that meet these challenges. Advanced packaging techniques combine these together into tiny systems to enable companies and researchers to rapidly address different needs. In this way, we minimise implant size and power consumption, opening up new approaches for surgery (akin to the switch to keyhole surgery) that reduce risks to patients. This project is a collaboration between Mint Neurotechnologies, Amber Therapeutics, and Imperial College London to co-create a "chipset" (group of chips designed to work together for a specific application) and package it into a device. This will first constitute the electronics of a medical device for treating mixed urinary incontinence (no other treatment available on the market yet) and will unlock new device therapies beyond the first application. More long-term, these chipset and packaging capabilities will enable faster, cheaper development of implants, making the technology accessible for patients with rarer or currently untreated neurological conditions.

Urinary incontinence (UI) is a common condition that can severely impact physical, mental and financial wellbeing. Though it is thought at least 8.5% of the global population suffer from UI, many do not admit it, with fewer than half of adults with severe UI seeking help from healthcare providers; one study found that men would rather admit to sexual impotence than symptoms of incontinence. Amber-UI will be a highly innovative implantable bioelectronic neuroprosthesis intended to provide synthetic continence reflexes in patients with UI who have not responded to simple treatments like lifestyle changes, pelvic floor exercises, medication, bladder injections, etc. Where current options for these patients consist of high-risk, variably successful surgery or dated on-size-fits-all electrical stimulation therapies that mostly only reduce rather than cure symptoms, Amber-UI will bring intelligent adaptive stimulation. It will respond to the individual patient's physiology and measurable biomarkers of both 'urge' (the sudden need to urinate) and 'stress' events (coughing, sneezing, lifting, etc). In effect, Amber-UI will restore the normal mechanisms of continence in a large group of UI patients so that they remain dry all the time---transforming these patients' lives. Conducting experimental medicine in first-time-in-human studies, this project will refine Amber-UI's minimally-invasive surgical technique so that it requires a similar surgeon skill/time commitment as current electrical stimulation therapy surgeries, and it will explore and optimise Amber-UI sensing and stimulation to ultimately provide patients with synthetic reflex control of continence.