electroCore’s non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation therapy safe, effective across a variety of conditions

Jan 29 2015

Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS) ‘improves the safety and tolerability of
VNS making it more accessible and facilitating further investigations across a wide range of uses when compared with surgically implanted VNS’ according to a review in the European Journal of Neurology. The review then went on to look at the efficacy of both surgically implanted VNS and non-invasive VNS including electroCore’s gammaCore device.

Professor Stephen Silberstein of Thomas Jefferson University – one of the authors of the paper – commented:

This review confirms that nVNS is safe and effective and because there is no surgery involved and because the costs are very competitive we believe it could open up a whole variety of conditions which we have responded to vagus nerve stimulation.

The Cyberonics VNS implant which has a licence in North America and Europe for refractory epilepsy and depression has been implanted in more than 70,000 patients over the last twenty years and has been found to be helpful to patients with several other conditions including headache, anxiety, gastric obesity and other conditions. However because of the high cost of treatment and the involvement of a surgical procedure these conditions were never researched in depth or brought to market.

JP Errico, CEO and founder of electroCore, commented:

This paper again validates how safe and effective VNS therapy is. It also shows how our gammaCore device can eliminate the surgical side effects and still provide effective stimulation. Our extensive pre-clinical and clinical program is already demonstrating how effective this treatment is across a variety of conditions.

electroCore has developed non-invasive Vagus Nerve Stimulation (nVNS) self-administered therapies for the treatment of multiple conditions in neurology, psychiatry, gastroenterology and respiratory fields. The company’s initial focus is on the treatment of primary headaches (migraine and cluster headache), and the associated chronic co-morbidities of gastric motility, psychiatric, sleep, and pain disorders that drive disproportionately large direct and indirect costs within the healthcare system and society.