Russ: Okay, it's guest time on the show and, with me now I have Will Rosellini, the co-founder and CEO of MicroTransponder. Will, welcome to The Business Makers show.

Will: Thanks for having me.

Russ: Let's start by you telling us about MicroTransponder.

Will: So, Micro Transponder is a medical device company, developing a way to wirelessly interact with the nervous system. It's the brainchild of Dr. Larry Cauller who had 30 years experience of interacting with the brain, and towards the end of his career decided I'm sick of having to access the brain, and I'm sick of all these wires I have to put in to communicate with the brain. Instead, he says, "Well, I'm going to go interact with the peripheral nervous system," so all the nerves outside of the spinal cord. And he says that, "Instead of using wires, I'm going to use traditional toll tag technology, and power these devices up using a coil-to-coil coupling."

So, very old technology, and since we were at Richardson in the telecom corridor, and there was a lot of available expertise to say, "Hey, let's make these things wireless." The government had worked with Larry on a number of projects, and said, "Well, we have a use for a way to wirelessly interact with the nervous system. When soldiers come back with an amputation, we're going to hook up a robot arm and have you control it using the remaining peripheral nerves." So this is called the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. They expect to have what they call a Luke Skywalker replacement arm available in 2011, so really interesting technology. Larry completed the work under that program, and agreed to start a company with me to commercialize this innovation. We very quickly realized that building $50,000 robot arms was not the easiest market opportunity

Russ: Okay.

Will: So I joined forces with Larry, and we immediately went to Dr. Richard Weiner who's the chair of neurosurgery at Presbyterian. And he said, "What I would do with theses devices is just have them wirelessly interrupt the nerves that are causing people chronic pain, and so MicroTransponder was really the marriage of this wireless way to activate nerves and Dr. Wiener's way to confuse the nervous system with electricity to alleviate the symptoms of chronic pain.

Russ: So, then today then the practical application is a form of mitigating pain?

Will: Correct.

Russ: Okay, I think our listeners can relate to that, and that's a good thing. So how far down the path are you to be able to prove that you can do this with this wireless technology?

Will: Well, I'm patient zero, so I've taken an implant, and it works. There's always going to be an argument of well, how well does it work? How many patients do you need to prove this? So where we are now, is we've shown that this works in animals, actually the chairman and the CEO is the only one allowed to take an implant, because no one can technically boss him around and force him to do it. So we can't make employees take the implant, but I took it, and it feels like it's activating nerves, and it should work in a larger patient population.

Russ: So describe specifically your experiment with the device.

Will: So what we did was essentially take a needle and put it into the dermatome around the thumb, and turn the device on through that needle which allowed us to simulate what it would feel like to have a device, stimulate that nerve around your finger. So if you had arthritis, you had some kind of lingering chronic pain that couldn't be addressed with pharmaceuticals, this electricity would interrupt the signal coming back from your thumb to your brain. And instead of saying, "Okay, I'm in pain," it says, "I'm confused. I'm going to just make this go numb," and that's what happens.

Russ: Okay, so you actually had a needle injected into your thumb and once the current went through it, you couldn't feel pain.

Will: Yeah, the current was generated by our devices, so we've modified it slightly because, you know, the implant wasn't quite ready for full implantation. So we've done as close as we can do without getting in trouble.

Russ: Okay.

Will: So one of the really interesting things that is happening, and this isn't just at MicroTransponder, but a lot of people have said, technology, especially IT technology, is increasing experientially. So you have heard of Moores Law, technology doubling every 18 months in terms of speed.

Russ: Right.

Will: Well all of these electronics are shrinking to a size and are sealed in such a way and robust in such a way that you can put them into the nervous system and start controlling it using an on/off switch. And what we have been trying to do for the last 2000 years is ingest something then digest it and have it go out to your body and slowly release over 8 hours. And instead if you were able to turn a medical device on and off, you can more precisely control the therapy. And its really exciting because IT is developing to a point where the neuroscientists are saying "if I had that then I could do this." And its really interesting.

Russ: But before we go further down the path, what about the robotics application? Is that still going forward as well?

Will: So, the DARPA program is still going forward. It's an, I think, $90 million program, which is too big and too commercial at this point for Larry to participate in. He was part of the core science, and so they moved on to commercialization. He's not part of that anymore.

Russ: Okay, so back to pain. I love the idea of innovation getting rid of pain, and you've already mentioned several types of pain. Well, does that determine where strategically you would put the implant in a person's body and nervous system?

Will: One of the things we think the most likely use for our device will be if you have chronic migraines. So there's 40 million people that will experience a headache that causes them to miss work. These people generally can be helped with pharmaceuticals, but for a small segment of that population, opioids and other very strong pain killers do not work, so they have to sit in a dark room and they can't attend work, etcetera, etcetera. So we think by placing our little tiny devices right below the base of the neck where your hair meets sort of your neck, we can activate the occipital nerve and alleviate that pain. In fact, Dr. Richard Wiener is a pioneer in this area and has been treating occipital neuralgia for past 12 years in humans successfully with wire devices.

Russ: I happen to know that migraines, you know, in addition to the pain, that there are other symptoms that come along with it. Would this device actually eliminate all of those symptoms?

Will: The easy answer is yes, and the more complex answer is that no physician, anesthesiologist, neurosurgeon, understands the mechanism of pain, so there's a lot of psychology that goes into what the perception of pain actually is. So whereas the sensation of this chronic, sort of what feels like a, you know, burning, or, or however it manifests, that would be alleviated; however, the psychosis associated with why you felt chronic pain in the first place might not go away.

Russ: Okay, we're talking with Will Rosellini, the co-founder and CEO of MicroTransponder, and we'll be back with more with Will after this. You're listening to The Business Makers show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com

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Russ: Okay, continuing on with Will Rosellini, the co-founder and CEO of MicroTransponder, the company that is using real cool technology to offer products that will alleviate pain. Now, Will I know about your background. You have a whole host of graduate degrees along the way, but you also have a stint in major league baseball. You were a right-handed pitcher with the Arizona Diamondbacks and apparently took quite a divergence into this area. What was it that motivated you to be here today?

Will: So it turns out that ten years later I might have a better understanding of why I did that, and maybe twenty years later I will know if that is right or not. But, as a pitcher, you're constantly interested in repeating mechanics over, and over, and over again to deliver a fast ball, to deliver a curve ball. And apparently, one of the things I was most interested in was not so much baseball, but was this idea of human performance, and how your mind and your body interacts to allow you to do something you've done thousands of times. But when you're front of 20,000 people, everything changes. And so I was fascinated with the idea that sometimes in the backyard I would be throwing 82, 83 miles an hour, and two days later, I'd be in front of 5,000, 10,000 people, and I'd be throwing 95 miles an hour. And there was nothing substantially different, other than the fact that I was very excited. So that's why I was very interested in neuroscience, decided I wasn't smart enough to be a ground-breaking neuroscientist, but thought I did have something to add in terms of just translating all of these functional disciplines to make people actually talk to each other.

Will: So I got a, a smattering of graduate degrees that allowed me to understand how to use professionals, made a lawyer talk to a neuroscientist in language that both people can understand. So I have regulatory background, a legal background, accounting, business, which intersects with the scientist and computational biology and neuroscience, and allows us to have fruitful conversations. And that's really the vision behind what I was trying to accomplish.

Russ: And all these degrees came after the baseball career?

Will: So I started college on a scholarship to Vanderbilt. We went 4-24 in conference plays, so I transferred to Oklahoma State.

Russ: This is baseball once again...

Will: We went to the College World Series that year, went pro and finished my degree at the University of Texas in Dallas.

Russ: Meaning when you went pro you dropped out of school.

Will: Dropped out, yeah, and finished in the fall semester in the off season. And then after pro ball, started in the masters program for accounting at the University of Texas in Dallas. Did an MBA, then went to law school. Got my Masters in computational biology. Came back to Houston, my family had a health issue that I needed to be back in Houston. So I was enrolled simultaneously in law school at the University of Houston and drove up to the University of Texas in Dallas to do my masters in neuroscience. Finished those and then enrolled in the Rice nanophysics program, the PhD program in Dallas and the masters of regulatory science in USC. Finished all that except for the PhD. I had to slow down my nanophysics, I just finished my regulatory science degree.

Russ: How many graduate degrees do you have right now?

Will: I think 5 or 6, then I have a JD, so what ever that means.

Russ: Goodness gracious Will, obviously your drive to gain this diverse knowledge set is off the charts. So what was your motivation.

Will: I retired from professional baseball and had some time, and as a 22-year-old, you can't retire and be done. So I spent some time just figuring out, okay, this is what I'd like to do. I was always fascinated with neural-prosthesis and just sort of kept accumulating areas of knowledge that I didn't understand full enough to go start my company. So that was really feeling holes all the way through. As soon as I didn't know something, I got a masters degree in it.

Russ: I assume that your interest in neuroscience and sort of the mechanics of what you were experiencing as a baseball was quite unique for the other players in the major league.

Will: So I had the same agent as Alex Rodriguez, and he keeps stats on this stuff, but at the time I was in the minor leagues, there was five people who had college degrees in the entire major league baseball. So, so yeah, it was interesting.

Russ: Well, back up a little bit more and tell us a little bit more about your life, Will. Did you show this sort of interest as a young teenager in, in say middle school and so forth? Or were you always like, uh, on the honor roll?

Will: I'm a classic case of a hard-working C student. So I've never been exceptionally bright. And in fact, the interesting thing, when I was ten years old, my dad brought me to a pitching coach that played with the Texas Rangers, Mike Basik, and said, "I'm really worried. He throws like a girl." And so I think what I'm an example of, is if you find the right people to give you instruction and to coach you, and all you have to do is work hard and apply yourself, I don't think there's any inborn talent that I have. It's just a matter of not being too arrogant to get help.

Russ: Okay, well what do you think there was about you that sort of had this work ethic? Once you got the help, you certainly went out and applied it.

Will: Yeah, I can't tell you where that comes from. I've watched my mom and dad work hard, my dad's a dentist. My mom's a teacher-and to watch them apply themselves, and never saw it any other way other than just 100% effort.

Russ: Okay. We'll be back with more with Will Rosellini after this. You're listening to The Business Makers show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: Okay, continuing on with Will Rosellini, the co-founder and CEO of Micro Transponder, and in fact, back to Micro Transponder. Tell us what the status of the company is today, and what your vision is for the next few years.

Will: So Micro Transponder has raised enough money, hired the right management team, to build out this wireless device to treat chronic pain. We expect to be able to do that by the middle of next year. What's really exciting is that when you have a device that can activate nerves, you'll be approached by a whole bunch of neuroscientists that say, "Well, I know how to activate this nerve to change the brain to treat a different disease." So one of the really exciting things-I was actually invited to congress to testify about this-one of our scientists has actually cured a neurological disease for the first time ever. So not treated a neurological disease, but actually reversed the pathology that is associated with it. For example, a soldier that's hit with an IED in Iraq will have blast waves that go through their ears and mess up the way that the sensory input from the ears goes into the brain.

Will: And what happens is they have this chronic ringing. So if some of us would have chronic ringing called tenidous, and it's irritating sometimes, but it's certainly not debilitating. But with these blast wave traumas, there's hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on soldiers that can't leave their room. They're debilitated. They're in an extreme amount of pain. And what we've shown in animals is that we are able to reverse the cause of that chronic ringing. And we expect to be able to do what's called targeted plasticity, to treat things like motor deficient if you've had a stroke and can't use your right arm, atheism and ADHD, so really exciting applications of the technology and neural-prosthesis in general.

Russ: I totally agree, very exciting, which sort of leads me to this question. I mean, why do you feel that this mission is yours?

Will: I spent some time in nursing homes, and in fact, I started and sold a company that was doing telemedicine in nursing homes. And essentially, what we were doing was bringing dentists to people in the nursing homes because they were not ambulatory. They couldn't get out of the home. It was very dangerous. And what I found was an entire generation of people that had lost their voice from neurological disease. So they're in chronic pain. They have Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, a whole host of things that have robbed them of their ability to complain. And so that image has always sort of resided with me in saying that look, if our guys can't cure it, I'd be ecstatic if our competitor could cure it. So this industry, and I think this group of people, working in neural stimulation, really have a focus on patient care and trying to rehabilitate these people back, to give them a voice, for the remaining quality of life that they can enjoy. So that's where we're driven, and it's nice to be working with a whole bunch of people that share that vision.

Russ: That is so cool. Well, before I let you go, let's say that we have an aspring entrepreneur who has a science bent for sure. What kind of advice would you give them to follow their dream?

Will: You know, the idea of being an entrepreneur is you have to ignore the 500 people that will tell you no every time you have an idea that you think is good. I can't tell you how many people will tell you what you can't do. The important thing is, is to also know that you don't know how to do it, and every time you don't know how to do something, don't figure it out for yourself, ask someone who's done it 20 times before. And people are very helpful for someone that works hard, asks questions, and isn't too arrogant to say, "I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'll figure it out by working hard." So really drop that pride down, ask a whole bunch of questions, and work really hard to find the problems that no one else will tell you about.

Russ: Well, we really appreciate you sharing your story with us today, and we encourage you to keep doing what you're doing.

Will: Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate it.

Russ: You bet. We've been talking with Will Rosellini, former pitcher with the Arizona Diamondbacks and now, co-founder and CEO of MicroTransponder. You're listening to The Business Makers show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.