February 11, 2016

Brainnovations, the country’s first accelerator for brain-related startups, recently graduated its first class of eight companies. The accelerator — part of Israel Brain Technologies – summed up the first cycle with an open call for Cycle 2 of Brainnovations, set to take place May-July 2016.

“We are now at a unique point in time at which technology can be used to address brain challenges and diseases – from Alzheimer’s to brain trauma and everything in between – as never before.  Our objective at Brainnovations is to bring great ideas in the brain-tech arena to fruition, and to help entrepreneurs navigate the complex path to launching initiatives in the medical arena,” Yael Fuchs, Brainnovations program manager, told ISRAEL21c.

“The first cycle of Brainnovations exceeded our expectations, and the eight teams we selected made tremendous progress. We now look forward to bringing everything we learned in the first cycle to the next group of startup teams, and are very excited at the prospect.”

The accelerator program comprised three months of lectures, mentoring, and networking.

Over 150 investors and mentors recently came out for Brainnovations Demo Day at the Google TLV headquarters to hear from the first class about the technologies they’re developing for Alzheimer’s, depression, spasticity, stroke, brain tumors and other neurodegenerative diseases.

MyndYou – a mobile based platform that monitors cognitive, physiological and behavioral parameters – helps families of Alzheimer’s victims to understand the status of their loved ones.

Taliaz Diagnostics has developed an antidepressant predictive tool to guide clinicians in prescribing the most suitable antidepressant medication for each patient.

Saheylu says its technologies “bind brains to software.” The company has two products: LibertyBell, a brain-machine interface giving handsfree, voice-free, head/eye movement-free control of a medical alert system; and, Myriad, an interface delivering the ability to communicate more deeply.

CerebraMed hopes to be a game-changer in Alzheimer’s and ALS treatments. This startup emerges from cutting edge research, led by Professor Hagit Eldar-Finkelman, at the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. CerebraMed has developed innovative proprietary GSK-3 inhibitors as drug candidates.

TMST is developing two acoustic wearables — a headset and a bone conduction device — to help people with spastic cerebral palsy in improving hand and arm movement, crawling, sitting, walking and standing skills.

Recovr.io solution is working to create a better rehabilitation process for people following brain injury in a Virtual Reality environment.

Sensomedical is developing a deep brain stimulation platform for the treatment of different brain diseases.

ALS Mobile Analyzer by Prize4Life developed a platform to measure daily functions of ALS patients at their homes, to objectively assess disease progression.

“It’s wonderful to see teams working on solutions to important challenges, that if successful could dramatically improve the lives of millions of people. We are living at an exciting point in time, in which technology can be put to use to address conditions that seemed impossible to address up until today,” Prof. Yossi Matias, VP Engineering at Google, and Managing Director of Google’s R&D Center in Israel, told IBT’s blog.

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