SOLS Systems Co-founderand CEO Kegan Schouwen-burg is a leading voice in 3-D

printing and mass customization,and obsessed with bringing nascenttechnology into the consumer sec-tor (Full disclosure: my venturefirm Lux Capital is an equity in-vestor). Schouwenburg’s back-ground in industrial design andmass manufacturing gives her aunique perspective on scalable sys-tems and products, and fuels herdesire to bring beauty and simplic-ity to new markets.  PreviouslyKegan spent four years running aconsumer design and manufactur-ing firm, learning the ins and outsof physical product, before becom-ing tired of the high barrier to entryin manufacturing, and leaving to

INSIDE • 3-D Printing Gains Foothold In Orthotics• Shedding New Light On Old Germs• Stethoscope Detects Epileptic Seizures• Emerging Tech Portfolio

Volume 13/ Number 6 / June 2014 www.forbeswolfe.com

/Wolfe Emerging TechREPORT

This month, we marvel attechnological progress in

two stagnant markets andrelay words of caution regard-ing a realm that affects eachand every one of us.

We lead with KeganSchouwenburg, the founderand CEO of SOLS Systems(Full disclosure: my venturefirm Lux Capital is an equityinvestor). After spendingnearly a decade running andbuilding companies in the 3-Dprinted manufacturing sector,Schouwenburg has set her

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The Insider

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KEGAN SCHOUWENBURG

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JOSH WOLFE, EDITOR

3-D Printing Gains Foothold In Orthotics

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Shedding New Light On Old Germs

Stethoscope Detects Epileptic Seizures

DR. JOSEF PARVIZI

Martin J. Blaser, M.D., is theGeorge and Muriel Singer

Professor of Medicine, professorof microbiology, and director ofthe human microbiome pro-gram at the NYU School of Med-icine. He served as chair of theDepartment of Medicine at NYUfrom 2000-2012. A physicianand microbiologist, Dr. Blaser isinterested in understanding the

Dr. Josef Parvizi is an associ-ate professor of neurology

at the Stanford University Med-ical Center. His expertise is infunctional mapping of thehuman brain using the threemethods of electrocorticogra-phy, electrical brain stimulation,and functional neuroimaging(fMRI) methods. The generaltheme of his group’s research is

/Wolfe /Wolfe

MARTIN J. BLASER, M.D.

join Shapeways (Full disclosure: my venturefirm Lux Capital is also an equity investor inShapeways). There, she built, and ran, theFactory of the Future. Schouwenburg holdsa bachelor’s in industrial design from PrattInstitute (2007).

When did you first discover 3-Dprinting?My background is in industrial science. I’vealways loved physical products. I moved toNew York to study at Pratt Institute where Ilearned about 3-D printing. I wasn’t satisfied

with what I could make with my hands so Istarted outsourcing my projects. One of thefactories that I had outsourced them to toldme about 3-D printing. At the time, it wasnot looked favorably in the program, but Ifell in love with the technology.

I graduated college and started a com-pany with a classmate where we designedproducts and 3-D printed them. BothMOMA and Urban Outfitters picked up ourdesigns on the spot at our show. After fouryears at this company, I discovered howShapeways was using 3-D printing to openmarket opportunities for everybody. Whymove your manufacturing to China when 3-D printers offer a manufacturing solution? Ijoined the team at Shapeways and I servedas team lead of distribution. I helped bringdistribution to the U.S. and built out its fac-tory in New York.

You mention that you began workingwith 3-D printing because you weren’tsatisfied with what you made with yourhands. Can’t traditional manufacturingstill work hand-in-hand with computermodeling?Yes. In fact, 3-D printing is just one meansof execution. It’s one form of digital manu-facturing, where tools are allowing us toshorten the time between having ideas andshipping a product. It will allow us to pro-duce things directly from digital files and toremove the touch points that result inhuman error.

How did you stumble on orthotics as akiller application for digitalmanufacturing?I was working at Shapeways and I was basi-cally seeing all these designs come throughand I was amazed at the variety of thingsthat people were designing. There are cer-tain products where customization addsvalue, particularly products that fit the body.There are so many amazing applicationsand technologies out there that just don’twork yet: I see them all the time. 3-D print-ing a scoliosis brace is amazing, but it’s notyet cost-effective. I think it’s great that peo-ple are innovating in the sector, but Iwanted to create a business that works rightnow with other technology so we can usethat to push it forward. I think that changewill come. I looked at all of these products,

racked my brain and thought, “What prod-uct embodies all of these?”

Everybody has to eat, everybody wearsshoes, everybody wants to be more comfort-able and we can empower people. We canenable people to walk outside and feel in-credible about themselves, as we customizenot the outside, but the inside of their shoes.

Before you founded SOLS, what did theorthotics landscape look like?On the medical side, the industry is stag-nant, old and forgotten. There are no regu-lations on how we do things or standardiza-tion in the product’s category. It’s verymuch region dependent, lab dependent, anddoctor dependent. What happens is youhave all those aspects of dependencies andthen you end up with people like my dadwho will sit down at the dinner table andsay, “These are my orthotics from 20 yearsago and to this day no one has been able tomake me a pair of orthotics like this.” Thisis shocking but true. We hear stories likethis every day. Medical orthotics are mostlysold through podiatrists, orthotists, physicaltherapists and personal trainers—all of thesesort of dabble in the categories, but podia-trists have a lock down.

On the consumer side once again you’vegot unhappy customers, but they’re un-happy for a totally different reason. They’vebarely spent any money and they have aproduct that promises to be great and theyget immediate relief, but that product rap-idly deteriorates and smells bad, is ugly andis ill-fitting. People feel so betrayed by theproducts that they’ve bought and they feellet down. They can’t keep up with theirfriends, they can’t wear the shoes they want

sights on bringing a drastically new ap-proach to the $170 billion footwear mar-ket. Kegan and her team are harnessingthe latest 3-D printing and scanningtechnology to offer beautiful, highly cus-tomizable orthotics at an affordable price.

Next we sit with NYU Professor Dr.Martin Blaser, author of Missing Mi-crobes and one of the world’s leading ex-perts on the human microbiome. Dr.Blaser shares some startling numbers re-garding what many consider to be ourlargest organ and warns us that decadesof antibiotic abuse may be causing un-foreseen damage to our hundreds of tril-lions of bacterial allies.

Finally, we speak with Stanford Med-ical School neurologist Dr. Josef Parvizi.Inspired by a contemporary string quar-tet, Dr. Parvizi teamed up with a leadingmusic researcher to develop a method toconvert brain signals into musical notes.We learn how this novel technique willrevolutionize the way that we detect andtreat seizure activity.

As always, here’s to thinking big aboutthinking small…and to the emerging in-ventors and investors who seek to profitfrom the unexpected and the unseen.

The Insider Continued from page 1

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“We’re using verysimple, mobile-

based technologythat allows peopleto capture their

feet in a 3-D scanto empower the

doctor at the pointof prescription.”

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to and they feel socially isolated. I alwaysknew there was a problem, but I had no ideahow intensely people dislike the currentmarket. I think the fact that we have the op-portunity to change that and we can buildtrust that starts with a product and stems outfrom that is an amazing opportunity, andone where you truly have the potential to ac-tually help people.

How does your use of technology differfrom competitors?We’re using very simple, mobile-based tech-nology that allows people to capture theirfeet in a 3-D scan to empower the doctor atthe point of prescription to effectively seewhat he’s doing to the patient’s foot. We’reshowing him the sole, and what adjustingthe degrees of posting, the forefront of theheel and the arch is actually doing to theirbody. We can do mapping of risk of injuryor sensory integration, and predictive pres-sure mapping, so that two weeks later, whenthat patient comes to pick up his or her or-thotics, they’re actually going to fit. Thesethings are seemingly small, but they’re majorchanges to what’s happening now.

On the generation end, we’re developingand refining an algorithm that allows us tooutput perfectly fit products that are customto the patient’s foot, custom to the patient’sweight, custom to the force patterns acrossthe foot bed and custom to the shoe. Thatmeans if you weigh 100 lbs, as opposed to200 lbs, you’re going to need a differentproduct. That’s not happening right now.You get the same product. This will be thedifference between somebody saying, “I’mnot going to wear this” to “I actually wantthis to be a part of my life.”

Will there be any differences betweenconsumer and medical versions of SOLS?The consumer version will be customized. Itwill have more of a focus on comfort and

performance, whereas the medical versionwill be more focused on advanced levels oftreatment. There will be features that willonly have available in the medical productthat will not be available in the consumerproduct.

How has the market response been toSOLS?The appetite blows my mind. The strongestinterest that we’re seeing is with the shoecompanies. For them the value propositionis quite simple: if they can sell shoes that aremore comfortable then they have a lower re-turn rate and everyone’s happier. This is avery, very simple thing. Shoes are notori-ously uncomfortable. People buy shoes andthey’re okay with the fact that they’re un-comfortable. This is not something weshould be doing, especially when we’re pay-ing so much money for footwear. The or-thotic insoles industry is $4 billion and theshoe industry is $170 billion in the U.S.alone. If we customize even 1% of the shoesthat are sold at the manufacturing level, wehave a $1 billion company.

Where do you stand in terms ofdevelopment?Right now we’re in beta testing with 60 doc-tors. We’ve been in beta testing for about amonth and a half now. The plan is to roll outof beta and start selling this month. In thenext month, with our new Web site launch-ing we’ll have our new “find a provider” pro-gram. Potential customers can put in theirzip code and they will be matched to a localprovider where they can go get fitted forSOLS. We’re rapidly working on expandingour providers. We have a lot on the EastCoast right now so now we’re starting to ex-pand our West Coast network.

How big is your team right now?By the end of this month we’re going to be

up to 22 people, which is pretty incredible.This June has been really eventful. We’ve gotpeople starting left and right. We’re reachingthat interesting point where I see greatthings happening that I’m not involved inanymore. That’s a relief for me because it’sexactly what’s supposed to happen, but it’s aweird psychological point that you have togo through. It’s my job to keep that founda-tion aligned and steady and solid so every-one can keep executing.

What are some of the biggestchallenges that you’ve faced and howhave you dealt with them?I think it’s hard anytime you enter a marketthat is so closed and so rooted in its ways.That being said, it’s also exciting because ourcommunity is starting to trust us and that’svital to our success. This is not about forcinga new product on people. It’s about helpingthem to understand why our product is awe-some and allowing them to feel a part of thedevelopment. One of the reasons that ourbeta program has been so critical is there isthis vast network of doctors out there thathas been doing this for years, know a lot andcan teach us a ton of stuff as well. Instead offorcing a new product down everybody’sthroat, we’ve made sure to leverage every-body’s knowledge to build this together andcreate something that people are really, re-ally excited about. I think that’s one of theways that we’ve thought about working on it.

In addition to all of the marketing, brand-ing, sales and hiring challenges of othercompanies, we are also dealing with an in-credibly complex technical challenge. Peopleforget how much really goes into buildingand supporting a custom, vertically-inte-grated manufacturing company. But as a re-sult of conquering these challenges, the ceil-ing of what we can be is beyond anything Ihad ever imagined.

What lessons or advice do you have forother entrepreneurs or aspiringfounders?Be very, very focused on what you want toachieve and if you want it badly enoughyou’re going to make it happen. Do some-thing that’s actually worth doing. I don’tneed another way to chat with people on theInternet. I saw one amazing company theother day where they were helping people

3-D Printing Gains Foothold In Orthotics

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“3-D printing is one form of digitalmanufacturing, where tools are allowing us to

shorten the time between having ideas andshipping a product. It will allow us to producethings directly from digital files and to removethe touch points that result in human error.”

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Shedding New Light On Old Germs3-D Printing

relationships we have with our persistently coloniz-ing bacteria. His work over the past 30 years haslargely focused on Helicobacter pylori and Campy-lobacter species, which are important as pathogens,and as model systems for understanding interactionsof residential bacteria with their human hosts. He isactively studying the relationship of the human mi-crobiome to health and disease. Over the past 30years, Dr. Blaser has served as the advisor for a largenumber of students, post-doctoral fellows, and jun-ior faculty, and he has been actively involved in sci-entific and professional organizations. He served aspresident of the Infectious Diseases Society of Amer-ica, chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of theNational Cancer Institute, and chair of the AdvisoryBoard for Clinical Research of the National Institutesof Health. He currently serves on the Scientific Ad-visory Board of the Doris Duke Charitable Founda-tion. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine andthe American Academy for Arts and Sciences. Heholds 24 U.S. patents relating to his research, and hasauthored more than 500 original articles.

How do you define the microbiome?The microbiome consists of all the microbes that callus home, as well as all of their interactions with us.This includes bacteria, fungi, protozoa, viruses andall the other organisms that live in and on us.

When did you start getting interested in thisspace?I started working on the bacterium Helicobacter py-lori almost 30 years ago. We first viewed it as apathogen but then realized that it was the dominantmember of this microbiome and that it was disap-pearing. That brought me into studying the micro-biome. I postulated that if one organism was disap-pearing, others might be as well.

At the same time, I remembered something thatI had learned at the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention (CDC): farmers feed antibiotics to theirfarm animals to promote their growth. They do it be-cause it helps them use their feed more efficientlyand the animals gain weight. All of a sudden it oc-curred to me that the antibiotics that we give chil-dren might be having the unintended consequenceof obesity later on in life. As I discuss in my bookMissing Microbes, some of our ancient organismsthat are important early in life are disappearing andthat carries a lot of consequence.

Talk about some of the numbers involved inthe microbiome to give people an idea of howmassive this is.The current estimates are that 70% to 90% of all the

cells in the human body are microbes. That meansthat a minority of your cells are actually “you.” Therest are the microbes that you carry. To put it an-other way, we humans have about 20,000 uniquehuman genes, but we have on average approximatelytwo million unique microbial genes. This means weconsist of 99% microbial genes. We used to thinkthat these microbes were just passengers and wewere just giving them a free ride. But it has becomemore and more clear that we interact with them andthey’re interacting with us. So, in a sense, they’re partof our extended genome.

In your book you talk about the harmful effectsof overusing antibiotics. Why is antibioticsoveruse so prevalent in society?We suffer from a form of nearsightedness. The dis-covery of antibiotics was incredibly significant begin-ning in the 1930s and 1940s. We had terrible diseasethat could be cured with antibiotics. For certain con-ditions, they are the difference between life anddeath. Because antibiotics were so miraculous andbecause they seemed so free of long-term costs,everybody gave them a clean bill of health and said,“All benefit, no cost.” We know that everything hascost. It was foolish of us to think that things as pow-erful as antibiotics would not have cost, and the con-nection with the microbiome begins to illustratewhat some of those costs are.

How prevalent is antibiotics use in the UnitedStates?In 2010, the CDC conducted a survey of antibioticuse in the United States that showed that we issuefive prescriptions for every six people each year.Every child in the U.S. has gotten 10 courses of an-tibiotics, whereas the average child in Sweden hashad four. The Swedes are at least as healthy as we are,which implies that more than half of all Americanantibiotic use is unnecessary. In China, where antibi-otics are available over the counter, people are usingthem two to four times as much as we are.

I wrote Missing Microbes as a wake-up call tosound an alarm. We’re despoiling our internal envi-ronment as a result of antibiotics.

Can we tailor antibiotics to be less deadly toour microbiome?I believe the answer is yes. Up until now we have fo-cused on developing broad antibiotics because wedon’t know what specifically is hurting patients. As adoctor, when I see somebody with pneumonia who’svery sick, I want to treat him or her for all the likelysuspects.

We will soon have the diagnostic ability to

give gifts to sick people. Imag-ine if we could give productsthat people actually need in-stead of something they don’twant, and we could actuallyhelp people in real ways. Ithought that was an amazingidea for a company. Lastly, hirepeople that are way smarterthan you.

Where do you see SOLS inthe future?Obviously I want to have verystrong footing in the medicaland the consumer sector. Wewant to do insoles, orthoticsand eventually we want to doshoes and modular shoe con-cepts. I think there are some re-ally cool opportunities as westart to integrate other manu-facturing processes. I see SOLSas being wildly different fromperson to person. Right now, ifyou and I get a pair of SOLSthey’re going to be different,but visually speaking theywon’t look so different. In real-ity, they should be wildly dif-ferent. We should be consider-ing everything including shoetype, what sport you play, age,foot pad deterioration and in-tegrating all of that into our al-gorithm to make a product thattruly is customized.

Beyond SOLS, obviouslythis is our first product, but wewant to continue to push ourtechnology to other spaces soeventually that scoliosis bracemakes sense along with 3-Dprinted casts, shin guards, hel-mets, bicycle seats and more.We see ourselves as supportingcustomization for the humanbody to be better versions ofourselves, to empower our-selves, to feel better, morehealthy and more beautiful. Ithink the opportunity in frontof us is gigantic. ET

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quickly distinguish between viral and bacterialinfections. If it’s a virus they don’t need antibi-otics. If it’s a bacterium, then we will be able touse a narrow spectrum antibiotic that focuseson specific bacteria like a laser and won’t causecollateral damage.

Has anyone tried to map the microbiome?It’s mapped all the time in different ways. I’vecompared our knowledge of the microbiome toa map of Africa in 1800. We knew the outlinesand then over the next century we began fillingin the details through exploration. That’s whatwe’re doing now. It’s an ancient ecosystem thatgoes back ever since animals were formed onthis earth and it’s very, very complex. By study-ing it more we begin to understand the roles.

Have we noticed any differences inmicrobiome composition based ongeography, race, culture, etc.?There was a very good study that my wife wasinvolved in that was published in Nature abouttwo years ago comparing the microbiome ofpeople in the U.S., Africa, and Amerindians inSouth America, showing certain parallels differ-ences between them. To me, the most strikingfact was that the diversity in the gut micro-biome of the people in Africa and especially theAmerindians was much greater than ours.

This implies that we have lost diversity; thatsome of our microbes have already disap-peared. That’s what I prognosticated 15 yearsago. Her more recent work, which has beenpresented at meetings, suggests that the degreeof loss of our microbiome already may be 35%to 40%. That is really worrisome.

Do you feel that our culture’s fixation onhygiene and cleanliness has hurt ourinternal ecosystem?There’s an idea out there called the “HygieneHypothesis” that has been around for about 30years. It says just what you’ve said: “Excessivehygiene is bad for us and if we really want to behealthy, we should cover ourselves in dirt andeat dirt.” My hypothesis is different. I believethat microbes in dirt are irrelevant, but the an-cient microbes that we have evolved with formillions of years are important. The question is“How do we find the right balance?” I’m notcalling for the return of tuberculosis or HIV.We need to figure out which of the ancient or-ganisms that used to live in us are the most im-portant and bring them back.

Can you talk about what your lab iscurrently working on?A lot of our work consists of giving mice antibi-otics and measuring different things. We’restudying their propensity to become obese, todevelop diabetes and to develop asthma. An-other thing that we’re looking at that very fewpeople are studying is the observation that overthe last few decades, people are getting kidneystones more often. The most common kind ofkidney stone involves calcium oxalate. Oxalateis a waste product of the human body that wecan’t metabolize. It turns out there’s a bacteriain the gut that does metabolize it, and there issome evidence that oxalobacter is disappearing.

What is the extent of how individualizedeach person’s microbiome is? Will we beable to identify a person based on his orher microbiome?We almost certainly will be able to identify peo-ple by their microbiomes. When people take anantibiotic, the composition of their microbio-mes change, but my guess is that we’ll still beable to see the ultimate signal. In fact, there wasa paper that came out a few years ago thatshowed that if you looked at computer key-boards in a busy office, you could tell who wasusing them based on the bacteria that their fin-gers deposited on the keyboard. Your fingerbacteria are different than mine.

You’ve spoken about the size andcomplexity of the microbiome. How arewe using computers and data to powerour search here?I like to compare the microbiome to the airlinebusiness, in the sense that it is almost unfath-omable that the airline business could exist be-fore computers. We couldn’t do much to studythe microbiome until we had high throughput

sequencing to tell us what’s there and then thecomputers and the software to put it together.There’s just so much work on the informatics.New tools are being created all the time andthey’re making it easier and it’s giving us adeeper and deeper look.

Is the continuing increase in computingpower enabling us to study this faster andmore efficiently?Absolutely. There are two things happening.One is the improvement in computer powerand the associated software and the other is thedramatic decrease in the cost of sequencing. Se-quencing speeds are increasing faster thanMoore’s Law. We did a study eight years ago tostudy the microbiome of the skin and to get2,000 sequences it took one person about threeyears to do all the work. That was a very bigpaper. It was the first molecular study of theskin. Now, we can do a single run and we get 20million sequences after only a few days of com-puting!

Where do you see the field 5 or 10 yearsfrom now?I think we are going to be harnessing the micro-biome to do our work for us to treat disease. Ithink that we’re going to be finding the organ-isms we’ve lost and using some of those organ-isms to treat medical conditions. Let’s saysomeone has an immune deficiency of a certainkind. We’ll be able to find a microbe that speaksto those cells and turns them on. In addition totreatment of disease, I think the doctor of thefuture will be able to perform diagnosis via stooland offer individualized treatments.

What has the response been like to yourbook?So far it’s been great. Surprisingly, I’ve had verypositive reviews from my colleagues around theworld. I’m waiting for the backlash.

Do you think that we can still change theculture of antibiotics usage in thiscountry?I think it is not too late. A lot of damage has oc-curred and I wrote Missing Microbes as thewake-up call. 50 years ago Rachel Carson wroteSilent Spring to tell us about the harm from pes-ticides and that book made a difference. I’mhoping that Missing Microbes can make a dif-ference too. ET

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Shedding New Light On Old Germs

“The current estimatesare that 70% to 90% of

all the cells in thehuman body are

microbes. That meansthat a minority of yourcells are actually ‘you.’

The rest are themicrobes that you

carry.”

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Stethoscope Detects Epileptic Seizures

the study of functional specializations in thehuman cerebral cortex and the dynamics of ac-tivity across cortical regions. They studyhuman brain networks in experimental andnaturalistic settings as well as during rest andsleep. They record simultaneously from multi-ple nodes of the same functional network andtest their causal role in a given behavior or cog-nitive function. Their goal is to understand theanatomical and physiological basis for humanbehavior and cognitive experience and howthese might be affected in patients with neuro-logical disorders. Dr. Parvizi received his MDfrom the University of Oslo and Ph.D. in neu-rosciences from the University of Iowa. Hecompleted his medical internship at MayoClinic and Neurology Residency at BIDMC-Harvard before joining the UCLA for fellow-ship training in Clinical Epilepsy and Neuro-physiology.  He moved to Stanford Universityin July 2007 and started the Human Intracra-nial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program(SHICEP). His research is now supported byNIH, Stanford NeuroVentures Program, andStanford School of Medicine.  

Tell us a bit about your background.I am trained as a medical doctor. I specializedin treating patients with neurological problemsand sub-specialized in treating neurologicalpatients who have uncontrollable seizures thatare frequent enough to disable them and pre-vent them from having a meaningful or regularlife. The way we try to treat these patients is tryto understand exactly where the seizure is orig-inating and decide whether or not it is safe tosurgically operate. I practice as a medical doc-tor and I see patients with this particular kindof neurological problem at Stanford MedicalCenter.

How many people around the world sufferfrom seizures?One percent of the population globally speak-ing suffers from epilepsy. Thirty five percent ofepileptics have uncontrolled seizures, or whatwe call “medicated resistant epilepsy.” Thereare about one million patients in the U.S. alonewho have ongoing seizures while they are tak-ing medications.

Do we have any ideas for what causesepilepsy?We have some ideas for certain kinds ofepilepsy, but much still remains a mystery. We

need some more research to understand ex-actly why some patients are more likely to haveuncontrollable seizures than others. We treatthem medically, but they keep having break-through seizures frequent enough to disablethem for the rest of their lives. Unless we gosurgically and find the focus and cut it out. Weusually don’t want to go in unless we are confi-dent that we will be able to safely cut the regionwithout causing harm.

What are any other symptoms of seizuresbesides uncontrollable shaking?There is a popular misunderstanding thatseizures are defined by falling, convulsing andshaking, when in fact the majority of seizureshave no behavioral manifestations. They arevery subtle and can go undetected. Seizuresonly cause falling and convulsing when theypropagate to certain areas of the brain and takeover larger segments. Sometimes seizurescause a patient to be confused, lose his or hermemory, behave oddly for two minutes, andthen after that he or she goes back to normal.

If that’s the case, how do you define aseizure?A seizure is a departure from normalcy due toneurons firing rhythmically in the brain. Imag-ine you have a city and you try to listen to thecity outside your window. You won’t hear onespecific rhythm unless there is a coordinatedmass demonstration, sporting event, rally, etc.The brain operates in a similar manner. Whenyou attempt to listen to the brain, you will onlyhear a cacophony due to the sheer number ofneurons firing separately. Seizures take placewhen a population of neurons (we still don’tknow exactly how many) falls into a rhythm.

How does this relate to your work?Seizures that have behavioral implications canbe extremely devastating for somebody’s psy-chological health. I had a patient who got ex-pelled from class due to weird behavior, onlyfor us to find out later that she was having aseizure. We are developing a device that canmonitor the brain and notify patients or care-

givers when seizures are taking place. There iscurrently no device available to know what’sgoing on inside the head. As a result, we areworking on creating a device that listens to thenoise of the brain, detects when neurons arefalling into a rhythm and makes it easily no-ticeable for patients.

What is the current process to evaluateseizures? The current process is incredibly tedious. Sup-pose a seizure-prone student starts behavingoddly. He then has to go to the ER, where theywill likely perform a CT scan. After nothingshows up, they will show an EEG, which is arare, time consuming and expensive process.You have to haul an EEG machine that costshospitals nearly half a million dollars to the pa-tient’s bedside. Then they glue electrode afterelectrode after electrode to the patient’s headand it takes a long time. Only after that canthey capture the EEG signals.

At this point, you’re not even halfway. Youhave to transfer that EEG signal to a computerthat will visualize it with software, etc. Thenyou have to call a doctor at home to read it andtell you if the patient is having seizures or not.By the time the patient’s doctor goes to thecomputer and sees the seizure, he has to thencommunicate with the ER doctor, who likelyhas already finished his shift by then. The cur-rent process takes so long that it’s awful.

How would your device change thecurrent process for seizure evaluation?Our device is very intuitive. Our eyes are nottrained to capture abnormalities. Our ears, onthe other hand, are extremely, evolutionarilypredestined to capture varied subtleties. Ourdevice is extremely portable, so you can have itin your pocket, a doctor could have it in the ERor ambulance, and mom can carry it aroundwith her. You put the device on the patient’shead and after a few seconds you will be able tohear the sound of the brain.

How does this device accomplish this sosimply as compared to the current

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Continued from page 1

“We are developing a device that can monitor thebrain and notify patients or caregivers when

seizures are taking place.”

process?As I mentioned before, seizures take placewhen a large group of neurons fire in syn-chronicity. We have the ability to hear whenneurons fire. While our device is not able toread what your brain is thinking about, it canlisten to the global sound of the sphere, so itcan hear when parts of the brain are in seizure.Additionally, you can also move it around tosee which part of the brain is seizing.

There are patients that come to the Inten-sive Care Unit right after an operation be-cause they haven’t woken up after surgery be-cause the brain has gone into this circularrhythmic way. With our device, a doctor canjust put our stethoscope over their head andwithin a second or two they know if there’s aseizure going on.

Your goal is to have this readily availablefor parents and other caregivers. Howeasy is it for people to recognize seizureswith your device?In our tests we have shuffled four normal brainsounds and four seizure brain sounds and havegiven this to subjects in multiple surveys. Ourdata shows that more than 92% of people canaccurately detect seizures using our device. Theamazing thing that taking these brain wavesand turning them to sounds accomplishes isthat it only takes a second or two for them tosay “Ah, this is seizure. I can hear it.” Anyonehas the ability to identify if the brain is behav-ing normally or not. By the way, we don’t en-vision this only for humans. Many pets in thiscountry have seizures as well. This covers anyliving organism with epilepsy.

What inspired you to convert brain wavesinto music?In 2008, I was very tired after taking care of apatient who was implanted with electrodes inthe head. I went to a concert at Stanford byKronos Quartet. I listened to their perform-ance called “Sun Dreams,” where they con-verted signals from NASA spacecraft intomusic. I learned that engineering-wise, it’s pos-sible to turn any signal into sound.

It was in this performance where they hadconverted the signals from space into sound,and I realized that you might also be able toconvert brain signals into sounds. I foundChris Chafe, director of Stanford’s Center forComputer Research in Music and Acoustics,who happened to be on sabbatical so he could

waste this time experimenting with the signalsthat I sent him. He’s been a wonderful col-league and we’re working on this front to makesure that we can actually turn this significationto something that is more than just instantseizure detection. We are working on develop-ing the ability to listen to the mood of thebrains. Currently, we can grossly determine ifsomeone is fatigued or drowsy versus vigilantand aroused.

Now that you have developed the abilityto convert these brain signals into noises,what are your next steps?Our goal is to turn this device into an instantseizure detection device that will help tons ofdoctors and patients. We would like to get thisdevice into every single ambulance, ER, ICU,doctors’ offices, and into the hands of everymom and dad of epilepsy patients. Addition-ally, patients can wear these devices as regularmonitoring devices. The device will be smallenough that they could wear a hat over it ifthey choose to.

When you first started thinking aboutturning brainwaves into music did youhave seizures in mind, or was that kind ofan accidental discovery?I was more interested in learning how the brainsounds. It started out as a curiosity, but later onI became more focused on developing this as amedical device. The problem with most neuro-feedback devices is that they attempt to visual-ize brainwaves, whereas I believe that an audioformat is much more easily digestible. We giveyou the ability to listen to your brain in a darkroom with closed eyes.

Some scientists are researching using“noise cancelling” with neuro-stimulation.Is there any chance that scientists couldmitigate a seizure by using this device toread brain waves and “cancel them out?”A company is working on similar work here atStanford, and my colleague is the chief scientiststudying this. We have the technology to dothis, but it involves implant devices in patients.This is very different because it involves plant-ing an electrode at the source of seizures in thebrain, and it detects the seizure and then stim-ulates it. For that you need to conduct an inva-sive surgery to implant this device, which is avery risky proposition. We envision our deviceto serve as a “stethoscope for the brain,” an in-

expensive, easy-to-use solution that tells youwhen something is wrong.

What are next steps forcommercialization?We don’t want to prematurely get this out. Wewant to make sure that our product is FDA ap-proved and for FDA approval we need a clini-cal trial. We are beginning clinical trials nowand will hopefully complete them within threemonths. We have a prototype that we’ve beenworking with, but it’s very early and notdurable. IDEO is going to help us turn this intoa nicer-looking, sturdy device.

You mentioned you want widedistribution for this device. Will the devicebe portable? If so, how will it bepowered?It will be portable, battery-powered and will beable to transmit information to the cloudwhere it will be saved. That is one of the aspectsthat make this device so interesting. If someonehas two or three events per month and the doc-tor wants to know what these events are, theycurrently either have to wear an EEG for awhole month, or they have to come to the doc-tor very, very precisely at the time that theirevent occurs, which is impossible as you can’tpredict when they happen. The beauty of thisdevice is that if you think something feelswrong, you can put on the device, which willrecord your brainwaves and send them to thecloud for further analysis.

Should you recognize that a seizure istaking place, what can be done to treatthe condition or mitigate symptom?When you know that a child is confused due toseizures, you can treat it appropriately. When Isaid “uncontrollable epilepsy,” it doesn’t neces-sarily mean uncontrollable seizure. Seizurescan be controlled right there with medication.Current treatments abort seizures that are cur-rently taking place, but they unfortunately donot prevent seizures from developing in the fu-ture.

There is evidence that detecting seizureearly on and acting on them shortens thelength of hospitalizations. So, if one hospitalcan shorten 10 nights of stay, you’re talkingabout numbers near $100,000. If one of our de-vices can be sold for $200, that’s totally worthit. ET

© COPYRIGHT 2014 FORBES/WOLFE EMERGING TECH REPORT JUNE 2014 | 7

Stethoscope Detects Epileptic SeizuresContinued from page 6

The Emerging Tech Portfolio

For editorial information, e-mail: nanotech@forbes.com

Company[symbol] Coverage Initiated Current Price 52-week range Mkt Cap ($mil)

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY INCUMBENTS Leading researchers in the physical sciences, with big potential for spin-offs and revolutionary breakthroughsGE [GE] 8/07 $26.67 $22.76-$28.09 $267,490.00Hewlett-Packard [HPQ] 3/02 34.40 20.25-35.20 64,370.00IBM [IBM] 3/02 181.97 172.19-200.94 184,190.00

LIFE SCIENCES Companies that are working at the cutting edge of medical technologyNanosphere [NSPH] 11/07 1.61 1.20-3.80 123.84

ELECTRONICS Companies that have corralled the key intellectual property that will be the foundation for next generation electronicsNanosys [private] 3/02 n/a n/a n/a

ENERGY Companies that are developing high-efficiency, low-cost alternative energy technologiesFirst Solar [FSLR] 8/07 71.10 35.59-74.84 7,120.00

ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES Tools and instrumentation that enable critical science and technology discoveriesVeeco [VECO] 3/02 34.23 28.23-44.39 1,370.00FEI Company [FEIC] 1/03 88.80 71.04-111.57 3,750.00Accelrys [ACCL] 3/02 12.50 7.75-12.58 696.99

INVESTMENT VEHICLES Funds that have investments in promising emerging technology companiesHarris & Harris Group [TINY] 5/02 3.29 2.83-3.94 102.64PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy [PBW] 8/07 6.89 4.93-8.02 207.36

Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Reportis published monthly by Forbes Media LLC and Angstrom Publishing LLC, 60 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

Editor: Josh Wolfe Contributing Editor: Jeff Weinstein

Forbes Media LLCVice President/Editor, Newsletters: Matthew Schifrin

Senior Editors: John Dobosz, Tina RussoSubscription Director: Diane Schmid

To subscribe call 1-877-733-7876 from within the U.S. or 952-646-5381 from outside the U.S.; or visit Forbes.com Investment Newsletters(www.forbesnewsletters.com) on the Web. Copyright 2014 by Forbes Media LLC and Angstrom Publishing LLC

NOTE: The Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Report is neither a mar-ket-timing service nor a model portfolio. Companies listed in theEmerging Tech Portfolio are early leaders in nanotechnologyand, as such, should interest investors seeking to orient theirportfolios toward this revolutionary technology. It does notguarantee that securities mentioned in this newsletter will pro-duce profits or that they will equal past performance. Althoughall content is derived from data believed to be reliable, accuracycannot be guaranteed. Josh Wolfe and members of the staff ofthe Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Report may hold positions insome or all of the stocks listed. Josh Wolfe and members ofAngstrom Publishing LLC may provide consulting services tosome of the companies mentioned in this publication.

Stock prices as of June 23, 2014

GE: General Electric rose 0.7% during a month of marathon negotiationsconcluding with the French government approving its offer to acquire mostof Alstom’s business for $13.5B. As part of what would be GE’s largest-everindustrial acquisition, the multinational agreed to sell its rail signaling busi-ness to Alstom for $825M and will be setting up a series of JVs to make na-tionally strategic technologies such as nuclear turbines. The French govern-ment announced that it would buy a 20% stake in Alstom, making it thecompany’s largest shareholder. The acquisition is expected to close next year.

HPQ: Hewlett-Packard finished the month up more than 1%, continuing itsmeteoric rise over the past 18 months. The computing giant touched on anew 52-week high following an upgrade from Goldman Sachs [GS] fromSell to Neutral. HP stock is up more than 21% year-to-date, and almost175% since November 2012.

IBM: Big Blue declined 2.6% for the second consecutive month as the ITconglomerate continues to try to break out of a sales slump. Reports suggestthat the company is in talks to sell its semiconductor plants to GlobalFoundries, as the company is evaluating an exit from the chip-making busi-ness. IBM stock is down more than 3% year-to-date and is currently tradingat a 35% discount to the S&P 500 index.

NSPH: Nanosphere was flat for most of June until shares soared almost 17%on June 23, as the molecular diagnostic supply company announced that ithad been selected by HealthTrust to provide tests for more than 1,400 acute

care facilities. Under the agreement, HealthTrust will offer members accessto purchase Nanosphere’s Verigene tests to detect infections in the blood-stream, respiratory and GI tracts. Nanosphere stock is up almost 15% thismonth.

FSLR: First Solar gained more than 17% last month as the U.S. Departmentof Commerce announced anti-subsidy tariffs ranging from over 18.5% to35% on Chinese solar equipment companies, greatly benefiting Americansolar companies. Additionally, First Solar announced that it plans to acquirethe German firm Skytron Energy in a move that would more than doublethe company’s operations and management assets. The company was alsochosen to build a 150 MW facility near El Centro, California.

VECO: Veeco Instruments shares gained 4% during the month, as the LEDand hard disk drive manufacturer saw its Buy rating reaffirmed by analystsat Berenberg Bank.

FEIC: FEI Company shares climbed 11.1% after it more than doubled its div-idend to $0.25 per share. Despite a rare earnings miss last month, the com-pany believes that it remains on track to hit $1B in sales.

TINY: Harris & Harris Group declined 2.6% on the month.

PBW: The PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy portfolio gained 9.2% onthe month.

Word on the Street

8 | JUNE 2014 © COPYRIGHT 2014 FORBES/WOLFE EMERGING TECH REPORT