Startup Spotlight #129: Encora
Encora is a clinical-stage medical device company that provides affordable, personalized, non-invasive remedies for patients with neurological movement disorders.
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I got the chance to speak with Trang Luu, co-founder of Encora, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Trang Luu is the co-founder of Encora, a clinical-stage medical device company. She and her other three co-founders developed the company’s core technology during an undergraduate class at MIT. After witnessing the reactions of the first patients testing the device’s prototype to relieve hand tremors, the four founders of Encora were compelled to continue the development process. This March, the device received designation as a breakthrough device from the FDA.
Luu holds her bachelor's and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She loves applying her technical background to create products that can significantly impact someone’s daily life. Luu finds the challenges and the fast-paced nature of startups stimulating and thrilling.
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Startup Spotlight: Encora
Problem: Hand tremors can make it nearly impossible for people with Parkinson’s Disease and Essential Tremor to complete the activities necessary for independent living. Unfortunately, the current treatments for tremors are limited to burdensome medications and/or invasive surgeries that have debilitating side effects, inherent risks, and are not always effective.
Market: Our technology will first address the needs of 1M people with Parkinson’s and 11M people with Essential Tremor in the US with hand tremors. We plan to expand our innovation of adaptive vibratory stimulus to address the unmet needs of the 42M movement disorder patients in the US before expanding worldwide.
Solution: The Encora Tremor Mitigation wristband can provide hand tremor relief by autonomously optimizing vibratory stimulation for individuals in real-time and without additional side effects, tremor management burden, or clinician visits.
Team: The four co-founders of Encora: Daniel Carballo, Alli Davanzo, Kyle Pina, and Trang Luu met in an undergraduate class at MIT and have been working together to overcome hurdles in the development of the device for the past three years.
Recent Success:
Luu: I took a graduate class in medical device design during my master’s at MIT, and I still remember the professor cautioning us on the first day that building a startup is hard, but building a medical device startup is ten orders of magnitude harder. He was right. The difficulty of building a medical device startup comes from not knowing what you don’t know. I can still clearly recall the overwhelming amount of information being thrown at us and the frustration spent trying to decipher which piece of advice is applicable to us. As a team, we have made large strides navigating the common obstacles and pitfalls that founders face in regular startups as well as the challenges unique to medical devices startups. Four is a relatively large number of founders with similar backgrounds, and when we started, not everyone was full-time as we are now. Our mission to develop a device for these underserved communities united us to bridge the gaps we had in expertise and in resources. We committed ourselves to communicating, adapting to new changes, resolving difficult problems, and embracing completely new roles.
To date, we have successfully aligned ourselves on future goals, found our product-market fit, raised an angel round and a pre-seed round, and submitted our non-provisional patent application. We have also achieved large milestones unique to medical devices—we have formed a partnership with two key researchers in the movement disorder area for future clinical trials, verified our FDA device clearance pathway and insurance reimbursement strategy with consultants, and have been designated as a breakthrough device by the FDA. The Breakthrough Device Program was created to accelerate the path to market for innovative medical devices that demonstrate the promise to substantially improve the standard of care for patients with life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating conditions. Our designation as a breakthrough device will significantly fast-track our process to FDA clearance. Please see our press release for more details.
Recent Struggle:
Luu: The first major challenge we faced when building our medical device startup revolved around understanding the regulatory and legal hurdles of building and testing our medical device. The second challenge we faced and will continue to face is the uncertainty of making the right decision at the right time when all the required expenses for medical device development have such large price tags and our funding is limited. The four founders have all stepped up to fill multiple roles to keep efficiency high and expenses low.
In one day, I can change from my grant writing hat to my regulatory strategy hat, to my social media hat, to my clinical trial designing hat. For areas that the founders cannot fill, we have formed a scientific advisory board filled with key opinion leaders in the movement disorder space and mentors with specific expertise in startup building, commercialization, manufacturing, reimbursements, regulatory strategy, etc. With the help of our extended Encora team, we are confident we have what it takes to take this product to market.
Founder Advice:
Luu: If anyone can do anything, it’s you and this is it. This is not a motivational quote I have hanging in my room; this is the name of my workout playlist. Working out is a part of my daily routine and sticking to it helps me build up my discipline. When I am overwhelmed and completely burnt out, it is the discipline that helps me deliver on deadlines—not motivation. I’m sure all startup founders have been advised to take care and not let themselves get to the breaking point, but chances are you might have days, weeks, or months where you feel lethargic, unproductive, and stressed.
My advice to you is to form tiny goals and adhere to a set schedule. These goals could be work-related or not; what matters is when you accomplish set goals, you build up momentum and restore the lost confidence in yourself. Always remember, to take on the world, you must first take on cleaning your room, doing your laundry, eating healthy, working out, sleeping a healthy amount, petting your dog, among other things that you personally care about. We are sprinting a marathon.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Luu: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Susan Conover, Founder and CEO of LuminDx: LuminDx focuses on elevating doctors to quickly and accurately identify skin conditions using computer vision and AI.
Claire Traweek, Founder of AuraBlue: AuraBlue is the first smart mattress pad that preemptively responds to counteract sweating and awakening.
Aya Suzuki, Founder of Aavia: Aavia provides a health platform and a smart pill case to assist users to monitor their hormone cycle.
Elliot Owen, Founder of Electric Era Technologies: Electric Era Technologies makes high-power charging stations affordable with their state-of-the-art high power storage that can discharge batteries in minutes instead of hours.
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