AI Summary
5 min readAn Implant That Tracks And Treats Cancer Tumors
Ben Woodington, CEO and co-founder of Coherence, is building something that sounds like science fiction but already exists in prototype form: a brain implant about the size of a shirt button that sits inside the skull, directly against a tumor, delivering electrical stimulation while continuously recording what the cancer is doing. The company is part of a young field called cancer neuroscience, which emerged roughly a decade ago when researchers at Stanford showed that cancer cells in the brain don't just sit there — they form functional synaptic connections with healthy neurons, integrating themselves into the brain's electrical network. "These cells, these cancerous cells, they're actually forming functional networks with the rest of the brain," Woodington says. "Which was the big breakthrough."
The Fourth Way to Treat Cancer
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Navigation Outline
- 2 (00:02) **Episode Introduction: Cancer as a Bioelectronic Problem** - Ashlee Vance sets up the episode, describing Coherence's radically different approach to cancer treatment using brain implants to monitor and electrically modulate tumors.
- 3 (02:14) **Ben Woodington's Background and the Genesis of Coherence** - Ben describes his path from spinal cord injury research at Cambridge to co-founding Coherence with Elise, an electrical engineer who applied systems engineering to cancer biology.
- 4 (03:24) **Defining Cancer Neuroscience: The Field's Origin Story** - Ben explains that cancer neuroscience emerged roughly 10 years ago, primarily driven by researcher Michelle Monje at Stanford, who discovered that tumors form functional neural networks with the brain.
- 5 (05:58) **The Existing Technology: Novocure's Optune System** - Ben explains the current state-of-the-art electrical cancer therapy — a bulky external device that patients must wear 18-22 hours daily, requiring a shaved head and causing significant skin irritation.
- 6 (08:59) **Coherence's Device: A Fundamentally Different Approach** - Ben describes Coherence's implantable device (called Soma), which is roughly the size of a shirt button and sits directly against the tumor site inside the skull.
- 7 (10:50) **The Dual Function: Therapy and Continuous Monitoring** - Ben explains that Coherence's device serves two simultaneous purposes: delivering electrical therapy and recording neural activity as a real-time proxy for tumor status.
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Show Notes
Treating cancer remains a crude practice. We cut, burn and poison tumors, and we do all this with relatively little precision around both the initial treatment and our ongoing monitoring of how effective the treatment is. You show up for scans now and again and hope that whatever you’ve been doing has been working.
Ben Woodington - who is an absolute unit - and the team at Coherence have come up with a new way to monitor and treat tumors. They’ve built an implant that, as the name suggests, gets placed inside the body to keep a constant watch on a tumor’s behavior. The chip also brings with it the ability to deliver electrical signals that may blunt a tumor’s growth. We’re talking constant monitoring of a tumor to see if treatments are working and the ability to read and write electrical signals as part of a totally novel bio-tech device.
In this episode, Ben explains how this technology works and, more broadly, he walks us through the emerging field of neuro-oncology or cancer neuroscience. We have a look at Coherence’s device, which is reminiscent of Neuralink’s implant, and rival technology.
Since we recorded this episode, Coherence has begun a study in Australia where its device is being used to record and stimulate brain activity in patients having brain tumors removed. The company has also put out a paper detailing some of its work and has brought on Neuralink’s neurosurgery lead Matthew MacDougall as an advisor and investor.
This episode was a treat for me because I had no idea this type of technology even existed, and because Coherence seems to have made a remarkable amount of progress on its hardware in a short time.
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