ImThera Medical Generating Buzz Over Neurostimulation for Sleep Apnea

Some 800,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed each year with obstructive sleep apnea, in which the tongue relaxes during the onset of sleep to the point of physically blocking much of the upper airway. The condition often causes repeated interruptions of sleep, which can lead to increased blood pressure, coronary problems, and diabetes.

The established treatment is a respirator-like gadget that a patient is supposed to wear while sleeping. But nearly half of the people who are directed by their doctors to use these “continuous positive airway pressure,” or CPAP, devices simply can’t or won’t comply, according to Terry Davidson, a professor of head and neck surgery at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Davidson says he also is pessimistic about surgeries that are intended to move the tongue forward and away from the throat.

A San Diego medical device startup where Davidson is Chief Medical Officer is now testing a new approach, which uses an implanted electronic device to transmit low-current neurostimulation to the tongue. The steady electric current causes the tongue muscle to tighten, so it pulls away from the upper airway. The company, ImThera Medical, announced in December that it had implanted its technology in two obstructive sleep apnea patients in Belgium.

Marcelo Lima, ImThera’s founding chairman and CEO, tells me he views the non-compliant CPAP patients as an ideal market for ImThera’s technology. The company is in clinical trials only in Europe, and intends to implant devices in 10 more patients as part of those studies. In the European trials, a surgeon implants ImThera’s pacemaker-like device in the upper chest, just under the skin, and extends a wire to a multi-contact electrode in the jaw. From there, the surgeon attaches the electrodes to the hypoglossal nerve, which controls multiple muscles of the tongue. The company has posted a YouTube video that explains it all here.

The implanted electronic device is programmed a couple of weeks following the surgery to send just enough electricity to the nerve to deliver what Lima calls “awake muscle tone to the sleeping tongue.” A handheld radio-frequency wand is used to turn

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.