Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD, North American Editor of Inside Precision Medicine, hosts a new series called Behind the Breakthroughs that features the people shaping the future of medicine. With each episode, Jonathan gives listeners access to his guests’ motivational tales and visions for this emerging, game-changing field.
Brain-computer interfaces have captured global attention in recent years, but most public discussion has focused on assistive technologies—systems designed to help patients control computers, prosthetics, or digital devices through thought alone. Carolina Aguilar, co-founder and CEO of INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, believes the larger opportunity lies elsewhere: using advanced neural interfaces not just to decode the brain but to treat disease directly. Built around graphene-based technology, INBRAIN is developing implantable systems capable of reading and writing neural signals with far greater precision than traditional metal-based devices.
Before founding INBRAIN, Aguilar spent 13 years at Medtronic, including a decade leading the company’s global neuromodulation business. During that time, she saw both the extraordinary potential of brain stimulation therapies and the limitations of incremental innovation inside large medical technology companies. Her background in neuroscience research, including early work studying the relationship between pesticides and Parkinson’s disease, shaped a long-term interest in circuit modulation and neurotherapeutics. That experience eventually converged with the emergence of graphene as a promising material for next-generation neural interfaces.
In this conversation, Aguilar discusses why INBRAIN chose to focus on therapeutic BCI applications rather than assistive computing, how graphene may enable higher-resolution neural decoding and stimulation, and why Parkinson’s disease became the company’s first major target. She also outlines INBRAIN’s broader vision for personalized neurotechnology, AI-driven therapies, and future applications ranging from epilepsy and memory restoration to bioelectronic treatments for cardiometabolic disease.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IPM: You spent more than a decade at Medtronic before founding INBRAIN. What made you realize that incremental innovation was no longer enough, and why did graphene feel like the right breakthrough technology at the right time?
Aguilar: INBRAIN is a graphene-based brain-computer interface (BCI) company developing the most intelligent and adaptive interface between the neural system and AI to solve health for billions.
I started my career in consumer goods, but then I spent 13 years at Medtronic, where, for ten of those 13 years, I was leading the brain stimulation, or neuromodulation, business globally. I was always extremely impressed by what the company vision was and the number of disease areas and patients that we could help. However, I saw that every year we were innovating, but it was a bit incremental versus breakthrough. It’s normal for big companies to prioritize preserving shareholder value and revenue opportunities.
Investing in breakthroughs is harder; they usually just acquire those breakthroughs and then integrate them. And, of course, they revitalized their innovation. So I thought at that point that I could be one of those breakthrough innovators that could take a little bit more risk but then bring much bigger value into the field.
When the right opportunity presented itself to us, after the European Union put €1 billion into bringing graphene to market and after having gone through different speeds as pieces, we realized that it was the time to build INBRAIN and make that breakthrough a step instead of the incremental innovation of the past.
It’s interesting because I actually studied neuroscience at Virginia Tech, and at Virginia Tech, I had to define my thesis to study for my master’s degree. I picked up a combination of pesticides in the study. The study focused on the effects of pesticides and their combinations on brain chemistry in Parkinson’s disease. Right. So it was already quite oriented toward what we are solving today. And I got a grant award for the best vision on circuit modulation. So it was not about targeting the brain. It was about the circuit that was actually managing some of these dynamics of Parkinson’s disease.
At that early stage, I was already very attracted to the problem we are solving today, even though I did not know I would have a company dedicated to that field and to this innovation. However, it was always driving me in that direction. Medtronic was the company that turned that ambition into a real product and broad platform, which I also helped launch globally. So I guess it was always there. It was the seed that had been growing over time.
IPM: Medtronic exposed you to commercial, upstream product development, and engineering challenges. What did you learn that prepared you to build INBRAIN, and how did graphene change your engineering perspective?
Aguilar: It also evolves over time. So we start with a problem, such as pesticides in the development of Parkinson’s. Then I think I stepped into Medtronic as a solution to the problem that existed at that time. I was like, great. Now we have a problem. We have a solution. Let’s fix Parkinson’s disease.
At Medtronic, I was exposed to new experiences even while working in a commercial role, as I became a global director. I was exposed to the upstream. At Medtronic, there is a downstream process from which all employees receive their compensation. Then there’s the upstream piece, which is the product development and the planning of the next platforms. I was not in charge of that, but I was exposed to the process, the thinking, what is coming next, how we can make it happen, and where the constraints are. And that intrigued me a lot.
I discovered that I had a little bit of an engineering part inside of me that I never exploited. When the right opportunity came, I received a call from an investor friend of mine, who sometimes asked me to do some small due diligence. And he said, “Hey, there are some guys who have some graphene technology here that you might understand better than me. Do you want to come to the pitch?” I said, “Perfect.”
Then I saw that some of these constraints that we were dealing with in Medtronic in terms of miniaturization, higher-resolution interfaces, charge injection limits, and many of these engineering problems, partially, we could also solve by going graphene and going a different kind of electronics and a different kind of platform. When these consolidated and we created INBRAIN, I had to put a huge amount of effort into understanding semiconductors, microelectronics, mechanical configurations, and data architectures. So it’s been a huge learning journey for me.
IPM: INBRAIN appears to be building a platform strategy across multiple applications and devices. What are the product verticals and why does graphene offer capabilities that traditional neural interfaces cannot?
Aguilar: So it’s effectively a platform with three product verticals. When Morgan Stanley released the BCI industry report, it stated that the market was a $400 billion opportunity. We already knew that with one device, you could not capture all that immense market. So we were already working on a stepwise approach to the biggest opportunity. And this is what we have today on the table in the sense that we have a first product. The first product I can show you is a cortical interface. Starting with about 100 contacts, we can grow to a thousand. But in this case, it was not necessary.
It’s made of graphene. So it’s not about the number of contacts but the quality of what these contacts can decode. What is the precision of anatomy and the resolution of disease-related biomarkers that we can decode at high resolution in a way that that resolution is superior to a standard medical technology?
In some cases, standard platinum and iridium are used; in some cases, iridium oxide. We decided to create this first product for use for less than 30 days once it’s approved. It’s not yet approved, but we are getting closer, and it is the one that we actually took first-in-human. The results of those three reports are being generated using this device to demonstrate both the safety of graphene and its decoding superiority compared to metal technology. And, of course, within that first-in-human study, we also decoded speech at the phoneme level.
It was about creating the first step toward making graphene and consolidating advanced materials in clinical practice. So from there, the second product is actually an implantable platform that uses some of that configuration. So we use a cortical and subcortical interface to actually decode a circuit.
In our case, the microcircuit that is involved in Parkinson’s disease. And that is the second one. And the third product is actually the same platform, where instead of these two cortical and subcortical interfaces, we put in the central nervous system. We are truly connected to a vagus nerve interface that decodes the fibers within the vagus nerve, which go into the different modulations of the different organs of the body.
We go from reading the brain to reading the body. This sequence of product verticals opens up the immense possibility of a $400 billion opportunity. But even more important is the number of patients we could actually touch and improve therapeutically with such a platform.
IPM: Many BCI companies focus on assistive applications like computer and prosthetic control. INBRAIN appears to be therapeutic. Why did you choose direct disease treatment, and what makes it harder?
Aguilar: People say “invasive” or “noninvasive.” I call them implantable and non-implantable. And within the implantable, there might be different levels of invasiveness, but we were looking at the problem to solve, and especially coming from the field we come from and having experience for ten years, the use cases we saw are assistive BCI, meaning I transfer thought to action in the computer as solving a very important problem, but actually in a small population because, at the end, paraplegia and ALS. They are very important disease areas, but compared to other areas, there are smaller populations.
There were many people and companies, great companies, already aiming to solve that. So Neuralink and Synchron and Paradromics were always positioned there. And we thought, well, we have a similar approach, but maybe with a material that is much better suited to actually read and write bidirectionally, therapeutically. In assistive BCI, you do a ton of decoding. So, you read it and then transfer it to the computer. On the therapeutic side, where we are doing it, you have to read, write, and do that computing already within the implanted system.
It’s a much more complex architecture and a harder problem to solve. Now the benefit is solving the disease for as long as the system is active. And Parkinson’s was only the beginning. We are currently examining the validation of this program. We’re looking at memory restoration. We are looking at a set of disease areas on the cardiometabolic side that I cannot disclose without an NDA that we are developing with Merck KGaA. Those deals were unexplored or suboptimally explored by some of the low-resolution companies in the field.
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