Novela Neurotech joins INCF's Industry Advisory Council to help guide efforts in neuroscience

Reviewed by James Ives, M.Psych. (Editor)Apr 24 2020

Novela Neurotech, a medtech company at the forefront of accelerating novel neurological therapies through neural data curation, collaboration and sharing, is excited to join INCF's Industry Advisory Council (IAC) to help guide efforts at industry and academic collaborations in the neuroscience, data science and neurotech sphere.

INCF (the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility), based in Stockholm, Sweden, is a global leader in networking neuroscience researchers, funders, publishers and organizations to promote neuroscience data reuse and reproducibility. With memberships across 18 countries in four continents, INCF has been a leading force in developing and promoting open data standards and best practices in neural data sharing among international research communities. INCF has served as the interface between large-scale international projects, including US's BRAINI, Japan's BrainMINDS, the EU's Human Brain Project, and work at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Novela's strategic partnership with INCF comes at a time when easy, reliable data consolidation and sharing is becoming tantamount in neuroscience and neurotech research. On April 4^th, 2020, INCF endorsed the Neurodata Without Borders 2.0 (NWB 2.0) data standard for electrical neural recordings, providing neuroscientists with a common standard to share, archive, use and build analysis tools.

As a long-time industry champion of NWB 2.0, Novela Neurotech has been on the forefront of adopting and promoting NWB 2.0 to accelerate neuroscientific discoveries. For example, Novela's wireless, open-source, multi-channel electrophysiology kit, the OpenKit, stores all neural recordings in the NWB 2.0 format, which are then deposited to an open online portal, OpenBrain.ca, for easy sharing between laboratories. The OpenBrain.ca portal is set to launch in October 2020. Novela has also partnered with Loren Frank, Ph.D., at the UCSF Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, in promoting and converting data to NWB2.0.

With a membership in the IAC, Novela will be positioned to help align research hardware and software with academic workflows in the neuroscience and neurotech sphere. These efforts, in turn, will allow Novela to better uncover use cases and practical challenges in translating neuroscience research into therapies for patients.

INCF is very happy to welcome Novela Neurotech as one of the inaugural members in our new Industry Advisory Council. Bringing various branches of neuro- and data-related industry into INCF's activities is necessary to maximize the adoption of FAIR standards and best practices, and we are excited to now have a forum where integrating industry and academia in these areas can happen."

Helena Ledmyr, PhD, Director, Development and Communications at INCF

Novela's decision to join INCF's IAC as an inaugural member reflects its core commitment to accelerate bench-to-bedside translation of neurological findings, particularly in the area of closed-loop neurological therapies. Novela has long worked towards developing a personalized, dynamic and "smart" therapy for neurological disorders called dynaceuticals, a novel treatment concept tailored towards individual patients based on their own brain activity patterns. Compared to existing treatments, dynaceuticals can record aberrant brain activity such as in epilepsy, and automatically correct those patterns before damaging symptoms occur.

Dynaceuticals are a powerful solution to personalized closed-loop neurological treatment for conditions like drug-resistant epilepsy that currently do not have a cure. We believe that dynaceutical R&D will massively benefit from large, standardized neural datasets and collaborative research. Indeed, our core neural data engine, Neureka^TM, thrives on standardized data and meta-data to promote collaboration and data mining, made possible with our customized data sharing pipeline. INCF's efforts to facilitate neuroscience research through open standards is embedded in our own practices at Novela. We look forward to collaborating with INCF's vast global neuroscience network, and bringing dynaceuticals to patients who live with difficult neurological disorders."  

Ray Iskander, CEO of Novela Neurotech