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Dutch MedTech Startup Team Brings Fresh Hope For Sufferers Of Parkinson's Disease

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Timing is everything in business; especially where groundbreaking medical treatments, investments and acquisitions are concerned.

So when a pioneering med-tech start-up comes up with a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease - effectively a next generation pacemaker for the brain – the business and investment world takes notice.

News that comedian Billy Connolly was recently diagnosed with PD and that the late Robin Williams may have been suffering from the early stages of PD raised awareness of a disease that affects around six million people in the world who have been diagnosed with it.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus, a bean-sized brain structure, has become the preferred surgical treatment for advanced PD, with a global market value of around $500 million, and growing.

Now, Dutch tech start up Sapiens Steering Brain Stimulation (Sapiens SBS), is taking this procedure to a new level, with the goal of helping millions of patients worldwide, and just three years after its launch, has just been acquired by Minneapolis-based medical technology giant Medtronic, Inc. for approximately US $200 million in an all-cash transaction.

Based in Eindhoven, in The Netherlands, Sapiens has developed a special lead that connects to a pacemaker for the brain. It is similar to a cardiac pacemaker battery that is implanted under the patient’s collarbone, but instead of going to the heart, it goes through the neck, up through the skull and into the brain. The goal is to electrically stimulate two small brain structure areas at the base of the thalamus.

Founded in 2011, Sapiens’ co founders Sjaak Deckers, Hubert Martens and Michel Decre, who had been investigating some of the medical world’s unsolved challenges, had recognised that reducing the side effects and the procedure time in Deep Brain Stimulation surgery were two areas where precision technologies could make a huge impact.

Their next generation technology created a system with 40 individual stimulation points, with the aim of allowing more precise stimulation of the brain, potentially speeding up procedures and resulting in fewer stimulation-induced side effects.

However, such complex, medical high tech ventures are not for the faint-hearted, and require huge sums of money to get off the ground.

Sapiens’ ‘Series A’ funding in 2011 raised €24 million ($31 million) and took a year to secure, at a time when the company was still some years away from launching a product to market.

COO Sjaak Deckers says: “We were grateful for an initial grant of €3.5 million which we received from the Wellcome Trust in London, an innovation loan of €5 million from the Dutch government, and a donation from the Michael J Fox Foundation. These commitments helped us to raise the €24 million we needed from venture capitalists.”

From its original team  of four, Sapiens has expanded expanded to become a research centre, staffed by an international crew of 50, based on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, a location that has proved conducive to collaboration.

Deckers says: “The collaboration works, because all this expertise is either in your building or at a five minutes’ walk away It’s a unique active network and difficult to describe until you experience it first-hand.”

The team will be expanded further, and Sapiens will remain on the site, serving as the global research and development center for Medtronic Inc.'s neuromodulation business.

“We are very pleased and proud that Medtronic has not only acknowledged that we developed a fascinating technology and IP, but also that our team’s knowledge and capabilities is world-class,” added Deckers.

Janke Dittmer, a partner with transatlantic growth capital investor Gilde Healthcare who led a round of funding for Sapiens in 2013, described the firm’s acquisition by Medtronic as very significant.

He says: “There is so much synergy between the two companies. Sapiens has patented breakthrough technologies and a unique team, while Medtronic has an established market presence with existing global sales channels in Deep Brain Stimulation. That’s the ideal scenario to bring this next generation technology within reach of millions of patients worldwide. This is by far the fastest and the best way forward.

“This is a ‘textbook’ case of a successful high-tech medical start-up acquisition, and I see no reason why this region of the Netherlands cannot be the source of many more.”

 

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