 Many times critical care requires mechanical ventilation to sustain life. Unfortunately, within 72 hours of ventilator support, patients can lose 50% of their diaphragm function. The muscle mass deteriorates. I'm Maya Pomroy. Today on the heartbeat, we interview the inventors and innovators who are developing a device to solve this medical problem that impacts millions of patients around the world. Hello, Dr. Black. Hello, Dr. Jaworski. Thank you so much for being here today. So some really exciting, innovative stuff on the horizon. Tell me about it. We're excited to help patients wean off the ventilator faster. It's a huge hot topic right now, but it's a problem that we've been trying to solve even prior to the pandemic. So unfortunately, while patients are on the ventilator, they end up having a hard time weaning off the ventilator. We're telling the diaphragm, don't worry about it. We'll breathe for you. And the brain says, okay, I'm not going to activate that muscle. So the muscle starts to shrink or atrophy. And so like any other muscle, it requires rehabilitation to come back online. And so what we do is we stimulate the nerve that's responsible for contracting that muscle periodically while the patient is ventilated. Therefore, it's getting rehabilitated as we're treating the other problem with ventilatory support. And then once the patient is ready to come off of that ventilatory support or be weaned from the into ET tube, the muscle is ready to go and come back online. How did you come up with this idea? I was talking to a colleague of my office at TMC Innovation. And we were talking about a lot of these neuromodulation companies coming through, companies that are stimulating nerves and a number of them stimulate nerves that have multiple responsibilities. One nerve can be responsible for gut motility, blood pressure, and pain all at the same time. And we're just trying to think of nerves that only stimulate one function. And that's usually skeletal muscle or other muscle muscular nerves. And so like what if we could shock the lungs back to working after a patient has been ventilated. And from there, from that kind of conversation spawned the new idea and the novel concept of what is now known as XN Health. And who are your biggest collaborators? Definitely Texas Heart Institute. They've been early supporters from animal testing to just brainstorming an idea. Mettie Rosavi's lab actually is part of the co-inventors on our early patents. We're also collaborating with TMC Innovation who forms a community of innovators that ranges from regulatory specialists to physicians to entrepreneurs. And so we have a great community that's supporting us early on. And most recently we joined HACS accelerator and that's out of New Jersey. And so they are giving us funding as well as pride development support. So they see the promise in this technology and they're willing to kind of be the first ones to put money behind it. And also Texas Heart Institute is known as, you know, the next first and looking for those sorts of opportunities. So tell me about how the Texas Heart Institute has been an integral part of this incredible innovation. One of the first people that I reached out to after I had the idea was Dr. Mettie Rosavi. He really has this innovator mindset. So he's not looking at it as just a cool technology but he's actually looking at it from a bigger picture. Is this something that has a potential to change and impact patient's lives in the long run? And he understands and respects the process. So I knew that if I went to him, I would be getting some sage advice. And serendipitously, he actually has worked on a product that had similar technical capabilities but for different indications. And so we're actually able to repurpose an old prototype of this to do exactly what it was that we were trying to accomplish. And so it worked out perfectly. Within days of me having an idea, we were already testing it at the bench top as well as in the animal studies. Did you know this before you approached them? No, completely unaware. I was like, holy cow. You did this. Yeah. So it was completely a by accident. I'm excited about the collaboration because, you know, we talk about how expensive these types of studies can be but having a lab and a research team that's already experienced in this has really helped us accelerate to where we are. We've been able to, you know, in the last year make some incredible strides in, you know, proving out our technology and that was because of the support from the Texas Heart Institute and MediRazavi and his team. And so we were able to, you know, prove a lot of validity to our concept on a little amount of money. And so it's been actually an incredible collaboration so far. Are there other doctors here that you'd like to collaborate with that are sort of on your short list now? Yeah, actually, you know, anyone that's in the critical care field or respiratory field pulmonologist would be really helpful. Physicians but as well as technical doctors, PhDs who do biomedical engineering. So a lot of what Dr. MediRazavi brought to the table was his team of engineers who've already had some incredible work with not only this prototype but just more general neuromodulation. So it was their technical expertise that I was actually able to conduct the study. So beyond the clinical problem and clinical concern, there's this deep seated technical question that we're trying to answer as well. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. That was very inspiring. And I look forward to, we all look forward to seeing what the future holds for both of you and Dr. Razavi and Texas Heart Institute and TMC. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.