An Implant That Tracks And Treats Cancer Tumors - EP 82 Ben Woodington

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Okay, we are breaking new ground on this episode, at least for me. We are talking to Ben Woodington, the CEO and co-founder of a company called Coherence, that is partially based in the UK and partially in the US. The company is broadly in the brain-computer interface field. You will have probably heard a lot about this with companies like Neuralink, putting chips in people's heads, folks who are paralyzed, who have ALS, being able to use computers, being able to speak again through their thoughts alone. Coherence is quite different from everybody else. It is using chips in the brain for the moment to monitor, analyze, and try to control cancerous tumors. The early stuff Coherence is doing is putting a Neuralink-like brain implant right into a brain tumor, and then trying to use electricity to blunt the growth of the tumor, and also to see if other medicines are working, not working with the tumor. It's this whole idea of putting chips in our bodies so that you actually know what's going on when you're having cancer treatments, and then using these electrical impulses to control the underlying mechanisms behind the tumor, to either slow its growth or perhaps even get rid of it. Typically, people go for MRIs and other scans every few months. The idea here is that you would have a chip that's constantly monitoring what's happening with your cancer and giving your doctor a ton more information. Coherence has been around for about three years. They've made what I consider to be remarkable progress. They already have a device. They've been testing in mice and they are heading toward human trials in Australia in the near future. Ben is very, very smart. He's got a fascinating story of how he got in to all of this technology, and I think you're about to learn about this new field called neuro-oncology that I barely knew existed before doing this.
I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go.
Ben, hello.

**Ben Woodington** (2:36)
Pleasure to be here, Ash.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:38)
It's nice to meet you. We're meeting for the first time.

**Ben Woodington** (2:40)
We are, yeah. Although I feel like I know more about you, because I see you on Twitter and your documentaries, so you know when you meet a celebrity for the first time, and you say like, oh shit, I know all about you, and they don't know you at all. It's embarrassing.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:55)
I let it all out there on Twitter.
I let the personality go. But who, did Ernie introduce us?

**Ben Woodington** (3:03)
Ernie, introduce us here.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:04)
Okay. All right. Well, this is crazy because I felt like I cover BCI technology about as deep as anyone, I think, and I had not heard of you guys. I had not heard of this entire field of discovery, and the idea that you could use electricity for cancer therapy, also had not heard of that. So I feel like this is amazing for me because I was reading about you guys last night, but I have to learn all of this. So usually, on these episodes, I try to set things up for people just to get their footing. But I think I'm out of my depth on this one other than what I read last night, which is we traditionally treat cancers with poison, cut them out. What else?

**Ben Woodington** (3:54)
Burn them with radiotherapy.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:56)
Right. It's a very drastic measures and then this is essentially, you guys are not alone in this, but you're pursuing a whole fourth way to possibly treat cancer with modulating electricity.

**Ben Woodington** (4:11)
Yep, that's absolutely right.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:12)
Okay, okay. And then from, I'm gonna let you give the history here, but from everything I read, it's roughly like 10 years that researchers have really been going at this. And I think there's a woman at Stanford in particular who's published quite a bit on, what is like the name of this field?

**Ben Woodington** (4:29)
Yeah, the field broadly, you'd call it cancer neuroscience.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:32)
Okay.

**Ben Woodington** (4:32)
And it's fields of oncology and neuroscience overlapping. And the person you're referring to is Michel Monge over in Stanford, who really pushed this field forward, accelerated this field, probably 10 years ago. She won the Brain Prize last year, which is sort of like the Nobel Prize of Neuroscience, right? For her work in this field as well.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:53)
Yeah. And I was like, oh, she's close. I'm gonna get her out and see if I can get her on the podcast. We're gonna get into how all this works, but if this started in earnest in some sense 10 years ago, what do we know the history of like, do people already suppose this was possible or somebody made a discovery or how did we start to get to this idea that electricity could have a role here?