Emil Hewage, Class of ‘06 who is CEO and Co-Founder of BIOS, a health tech company, has recently announced that the company will be taking their technology into eight worldwide clinics to power a ground-breaking new study funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The NIH, the US Government’s national medical research agency, is funding a $21 million clinical programme called Research Evaluating Vagal Excitation and Anatomical Links (REVEAL). This will take place over three years, with world-leading partners including University of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic, Stanford University and BIOS. The main objective will be to collect and analyse neural data from 150 patients and investigate the potential for neural therapies, delivered electrically by pacemaker sized devices on the vagus nerve, to treat a wide range of chronic diseases including Heart Failure, Epilepsy, Arthritis, Respiratory conditions and many more.

BIOS is a full-stack neural interface company creating the open standard hardware and software interface between the human nervous system and AI. Their mission is to pioneer the use of neural interfaces to create powerful new therapies for chronic disease. BIOS has been recognised as one of the leading neural interface startups globally and has won a number of awards, including winning the top prize at MassChallenge and being named one of the top startups at Y Combinator by TechCrunch.

Emil shares: “This will be the largest ever single clinical study of human neural data. We have partnered with world-class clinical and industrial organisations and BIOS will be instrumental in the success of the project - this is a major validation of BIOS’ platform and allows our technology to become the foundation of a next wave of precision neural medicines. The next wave of precision medicines will be neural, and BIOS is due to provide access to our neural biomarker platform as a core technology for one of the biggest human nervous system mapping efforts to date - to understand the link between our major organs and the vagus nerve, and to develop new and more targeted therapies for a range of diseases. We are so proud to be part of this team and look forward to bringing our technology to the clinic.”

Emil has held leadership & technology roles in five deep tech start-ups. He has over 10 years industrial & academic R&D experience and is a former University of Cambridge PhD researcher having specialised in computational neuroscience and machine learning.

He started his career in deep tech startups in 2005, at the age of 17, and was exposed to applied machine learning and AI through research projects at Siemens and McLaren F1 back in 2010. This led him on a research and entrepreneurial journey which resulted in him being named to Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018 and to MIT Tech Review 35 Innovators under 35 in 2022.