Mark O’Sullivan the High Potential Start-Up Founder of the Year
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What is the significance of support for Irish entrepreneurs?
Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk. for ambitious Irish entrepreneurs. Getting the right support to scale quickly can make all the difference. One of those who's done just that is Marco Sullivan, co-founder of NeuroBell, which is a cork-based medical device startup. Their first product, called Luna, is a portable brain monitor that uses AI to help detect seizures and really protecting very young, vulnerable babies. Marco was named High Potential Startup Founder of the Year at an event last week by Enterprise Ireland and I'm delighted to say he's on the line. Marco, good morning.
Hi, Jonathan. How are you doing?
I'm very well. We would have spoken previously because you were part of the Ignite programme at UCC, who I do work with every single year. Tell us a little bit about Luna and what it does.
Yeah, so I suppose NeuroBell itself was founded as a spin-out from the Infant Centre at UCC just two years ago. And the goal in general is to try and ensure that newborns with suspected brain injury get timely monitoring and treatment and specifically looking at seizures because they're very difficult to diagnose as they typically don't have any physical signs, unlike, I suppose, when we think of seizures in older kids and adults. So many hospitals lack the personnel and equipment to conduct routine EEG monitoring. So the first product, NeuroBell Luna, is a pocket-sized brain monitor that can be used by all neonatal ICU staff to quickly monitor and detect seizures. And I suppose that's with the hope that then detecting these seizures will allow medical teams to administer medication to prevent further seizures and brain injury.
So it's really an early warning system for something that could cause a massive problem for a newborn.
Exactly.
How does NeuroBell's product Luna help in seizure detection?
Okay. And like everything else, developing this would have taken time. How did you end up in this particularly unusual world, Mark?
Yeah, fair enough. Myself and our chief scientific officer, Alison, both of us started our PhD together back in around 2015, finished up in 2020 and a couple of years later managed to take the technology out of the university and to commercialise it. So I suppose we began researching new technologies in the space of brain monitoring for newborns and in particular looking at integrating AI for automated seizure detection. And then we received a grant from Enterprise Ireland to commercialise the technology and prepare for clinical trials. and around the same time then our CTO Colm joined the team and started building towards more scalable kind of manufacturing and we raised the initial investment round back in December 2023 and that kind of helped us to build out the team at that stage.
The big challenge, of course, you can have as many ideas as you want. But if you're in the medical device sector, you need to get approvals in place from both Europe and the US. But you are expecting FDA clearance, which is the big one to get into the US market next year.
Yeah, so that's our target is to push for market clearance. In the US next year, we have finished our clinical trial here in Cork, which was a great milestone to hit. But the next step will be getting it into commercial use and then hopefully following that very quickly with the European market.
The route that you've taken to market, Mark, is one that has become increasingly common here, which is, you know, universities helping businesses establish themselves on a campus and then spin out. You know, it's brilliant to see so many companies coming through this route, but you're literal proof that investing in scientists, investing in researchers can bear dividends.
Yeah, we've been very lucky along the way in terms of the supports we've been given, which is something that I think the Irish ecosystem is exceptionally good at. I think we spend a lot of time in the U.S., and I think Irish medtech companies in particular going into the U.S. markets, they always come with kind of a stamp of approval because they know that the quality of research coming out of Ireland and the support that they're given is top class.
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