Njoku: There is significant opportunity to develop therapies that create new standards of care and initiate a wave of precision medicine, which starts with our ability to sense, or measure, how the body responds to stimulation. Having this patient specific data will enable physicians to make more informed clinical decisions to support the needs of each individual patient.

Combining datasets from different channels to provide a better overall understanding of each patient is something we are also focused on.

But how we go about doing that is what we need to think about differently. Because, as a medtech company, we have a lot of capabilities, but sometimes we must look at partnerships that allow us to move faster in a certain direction.

Sharan: Our brain sensing platform is generating, for us, an electrophysiological biomarker. And that's going to allow us to understand the nuances of individual patients to ultimately deliver real personalized medicine.

This concept of data sharing is also going to be critical. Just getting patients from one center and looking at their electrophysiological biomarkers is not enough. We are going to have to get hundreds and thousands of patients, really, to understand what that repetitive signal looks like. And there are significant challenges around how to get that data acquired and analyzed, given all of the [privacy] restrictions in the world.

The field of neuromodulation has always struggled with expanding access, because we're only reaching a small percentage of patients currently who could benefit from these therapies. The great opportunity I see for us currently in the business is with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy. (Also see "Nevro And Medtronic Announce FDA Approval Of Spinal Cord Stimulation Label Expansions" - Medtech Insight, 24 January, 2022.)

We have a whole diabetes business and the conversations that we're having internally with them are phenomenal.

We as an organization have this web and connections that, I believe, are going to result in a synergistic result that will benefit patients.

Exec Chat: Medtronic Neuromodulation Approaches Inflection Point

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