Galvani Bioelectronics

Galvani Bioelectronics   (Pharmaceutical company)
Formation	November 2016
Founder	• GlaxoSmithKline • Alphabet Inc.
Interests	bioelectronics, Digital healthcare, Brain-machine interface
Membership	• Amy Altshul • Brad Hirsch • Christopher Corsico • Jordi Parramon • Ken Gabriel • Stephen Gillett • Subesh Williams • Moncef Slaoui • Kris Famm
Well-funded Google/GlaxoSmithKline joint venture working on hacking the nervous system

Galvani Bioelectronics is a joint venture between GlaxoSmithKline and Verily Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet Inc. The company researches implantable devices capable of altering electrical impulses in the body.

Own words

Galvani is developing therapies to treat disease through implant-based direct modulation of specific neural signals to organs central in chronic disease. These therapies are designed to be safe, precise in their therapeutic effect, and minimally invasive in their delivery through use of small and efficient wireless electronics and keyhole surgery.

Moncef Slaoui, head of research for GlaxcoSmithKline believed that "…this is a moment comparable to the birth of the modern pharmaceuticals industry at the end of the19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when chemical companies began to realize that they could design drugs with compound effects."

Moncef Slaoui

In March 2021, Moncef Slaoui, who in the meantime also had been chief scientist of the U.S. government’s Covid vaccine development effort Operation Warp Speed, was fired as Galvani Bioelectronics board chairman over "substantiated" allegations of sexual harassment. The harassment occurred several years ago. Slaoui also stepped down as chief scientific officer of Centessa Pharamaceuticals and resigned as chairman of the board of the vaccine company Vaxcyte because of the harassment allegations.

Problems

Despite the huge amount of money invested, this the technology is not anywhere near a working stage. The company may thus have similarities to Theranos or Moderna. It is also not clear if sexual harassment was the real reason Slaoui stepped down.

In 2014 company President Kris Famm explained some difficulties. "The biggest challenge is interpreting the conversation between the body’s organs and its nervous system", "No one has really tried to speak the electrical language of the body," he says. Another obstacle is building small implants, some of them as tiny as a cubic millimeter, robust enough to run powerful microprocessors. Should scientists succeed and bioelectronics become widely adopted, millions of people could one day be walking around with networked computers hooked up to their nervous systems. As Anand Raghunathan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, puts it, bioelectronics "gives me a remote control to someone’s body."

 

Known member

1 of the 9 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Moncef Slaoui	Responsible for warp-speed development of experimental Covid-19 jabs up to January 2021. Fired over a "substantiated" sexual harassment claim in March 2021.

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