A British start-up developing technology to monitor blood flow and pressure in the brain, without having to puncture the skull, has raised more than $100mn in funding as it seeks regulatory approval in the US.
London-based CoMind has received $60mn in new investment led by venture capital firm Plural, as it pushes towards launching its medical device in 2027. This takes its total financing since launch to $102.5mn.
It is currently recruiting in the US for its third clinical trial, to help obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.
The start-up was founded by James Dacombe in 2018 when he was a teenager, after leaving school at 16. "The brain is the most important organ that you have and yet it's the least monitored at the patient bedside," said Dacombe. "We want this [brain monitoring] to become as common as having your blood pressure taken."
CoMind has developed a non-invasive device that uses low-powered infrared lasers to monitor cerebral blood flow, inter-cranial pressure and autoregulation, which are particularly important metrics for patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury or during heart bypass operations.
Taavet Hinrikus, the co-founder of fintech company Wise and now a partner at Plural, said Dacombe was a "generational founder" whose success in building an "amazing product" in just a few years showed the benefit of approaching intractable problems with fresh eyes.
"When I was building Wise, I knew nothing about payments. What did Elon Musk know about rockets before building SpaceX? He was just damn curious," Hinrikus said. "When James was building [CoMind], he knew nothing about medical devices . . . The majority of innovation comes this way."
Dacombe, who is now 25, started programming apps and websites at the age of 13. He became interested in the potential of technology in healthcare by reading research papers about how artificial intelligence could help diagnose skin cancer using photos of moles.
He started CoMind after friends and family suffered from strokes and dementia, winning its first investment from London-based LocalGlobe. He also received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Fellowship, a programme run by tech billionaire Peter Thiel for entrepreneurs aged 22 or under who do not have a university degree.
"Our understanding of the brain is incredibly primitive," Dacombe said. "So many of the problems that we're facing today -- around mental health problems, Alzheimer's, dementia, never mind within a hospital environment -- are largely down to lack of understanding."
CoMind is taking similar optical and signal-processing technology to that used in Lidar, the light-based sensors that allow self-driving cars to understand their surroundings, and applying it to the medical field.
It provides an alternative to inter-cranial bolts, which require drilling a hole in a patient's skull to insert a pressure sensor. There are roughly 3mn traumatic brain injuries every year in the US, according to Dacombe, and as many as 15 per cent of inter-cranial bolts cause complications.
CoMind's system sweeps light through the skull, changing colour 200,000 times a second. The reflected light is combined with a second laser beam, which boosts the signal. The "time of flight" as the laser travels through brain tissue, as well as fluctuations caused by the movement of red blood cells, can be used to measure blood flow and oxygenation.
Its technology was made possible by advances in lasers and graphics processing units, to process enormous amounts of data in a device small enough to be used in a hospital, Dacombe added. CoMind is working with US-based contract manufacturer Benchmark Electronics to develop and produce the device.
CoMind has already completed clinical trials on surgical patients under general anaesthetic in Barcelona and at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London for traumatic brain injuries and published two research papers this year.
Michael Tarnoff, a US surgeon and CoMind board member, said the company plans to expand into broader patient populations across critical care and surgery.
"None of this has ever been done before and it all holds the promise of dramatically changing care standards while reducing costs and improving outcomes," said Tarnoff.