Three years ago, Daniel Carballo was finishing out his bachelor of science in mechanical engineering at MIT. His senior capstone was ambitious: He and his classmates wanted to make a wristband that would use vibrations to stop the hand tremors caused by Parkinson's disease.
Carballo and his team spent the semester grinding away in the lab, creating a prototype. Just one week before final presentations, they tested the device out on a single user — and it worked.
"When they saw his hand tremor vanish, the man we were testing with didn't want to give the prototype back, and his wife and daughter cried," Carballo said in an email to BostInno. "I decided that I owed this gentleman to make every effort to turn this class project into a real-world product for him to use."
Carballo, one of BostInno's 25 Under 25 this year, went on to found Encora Therapeutics, a medical device startup dedicated to that mission. Encora is working on building affordable, non-invasive neurostimulation devices for those affected by movement disorders, including Parkinson's. The wearables work by sensing, then counteracting a patient’s motor symptoms via customized vibratory stimulation to the wrist.
Last week, Encora got a major boost in the form of $1.3 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Innospark Ventures, with participation from Good Growth Capital (GGC), the Technology Accelerator Company and the SDX Holding Company.
The funding, Carballo said in a statement, will support beta prototype engineering and further clinical testing.
“We believe this innovative approach to neurostimulation has great potential to revolutionize the standard of care for movement disorder patients,” said Dr. Venkat Srinivasan, managing director at Innospark Ventures. “We are also particularly enthusiastic about the opportunities to improve care management through continuous symptom monitoring and data aggregation.”
