After meeting through InSITE this past fall, Wharton MBA student and US Army Combat Veteran Christopher Molaro and Penn Bioengineering PhD student Adam Pardes joined forces to launch NeuroFlow, a medtech company that seeks to change the way we see brain health.
The startup addresses the pervasive and costly conditions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Over 7 million Americans are diagnosed with these conditions every year, and even more suffer from symptoms but go undiagnosed. These missed diagnoses – and misdiagnoses as a result of overlapping symptoms and subjective analyses – result in direct and indirect medical costs of over $100 billion annually. In addition to being a financial strain on the health system, patients suffer from poor quality of life and are more likely to develop substance abuse problems or even commit suicide.
NeuroFlow is offering quantitative tools that allow doctors to more accurately and objectively diagnose PTSD and TBI, leading to improved patient outcomes and decreased healthcare costs. Statistical comparison of a patient’s cerebral blood flow patterns to a database of healthy individuals is used to highlight pathological differences indicative of one or both of these illnesses. By combining this information with non-imaging data (including disease prevalence and psychiatric metrics), NeuroFlow applies a machine learning approach to predict probabilistic diagnoses for each unique patient.
The company is also developing a real-time stress tracking digital platform to augment current psychological assessments and PTSD treatment. NeuroFlow is designing software that works hand-in-hand with existing wireless EEG brain wave headsets to quantify stress levels in patients. This will allow physicians to “peek behind the curtain” and identify abnormal brain activity during a standard clinical interview. It will also provide patients with a way to discretize and track their progress throughout treatment, which will further motivate them to keep improving their mental health.
Since their inception in November of 2015, the dynamic duo has competed in various entrepreneurial competitions, is currently in the PennApps Accelerator, and has raised over $10,000 in non-dilutable funding. They recently received the prestigious Wharton Venture Award and were also national finalists in Princeton’s TigerLaunch program.
They are actively developing MVPs for both platforms to begin testing in the summer of 2016 with plans to raise their seed round the subsequent fall, initially targeting the military/veterans market but rapidly expanding to athletes and everyday civilians.
More information can be found on their website: http://neuroflowsolution.com/