BY ANAT ROSENBERG
The revolutionary Israeli medical technology company Brainsway, a leader in the non-invasive treatment of brain disorders, capped off 2017 by breaking its quarterly earnings record and raising $8.5 million from Israeli investors.
Brainsway’s unique, patented technology is used to treat major depressive disorder in patients who have not responded to traditional medical treatment.
Called Deep TMS, or deep transcranial magnetic stimulation, the device, which resembles a helmet that patients wear, applies brief magnetic pulses to the brain using an electromagnetic coil (the H coil). Those pulses stimulate nerve cells in the targeted area of the brain, working to alleviate the symptoms of depression and other disorders.
To date, 20,000 patients, primarily in the United States, have been treated for depression using the company’s technology, and Brainsway is working to expand its use to treat other conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction.
In other words, the company aims to improve the lives of countless people around the world—and the seed for Brainsway was planted at AMIT Ginsburg Bar Ilan Gush Dan Jr. and Sr. High School for Boys.
Three of the great minds behind Brainsway—CEO Yaacov Michlin, and two of the company’s founding scientists, Professor Abraham Zangen and Dr. Yiftach Roth—were classmates at the AMIT school known for its strong emphasis on the sciences.
Michlin, who took the helm of Brainsway in April 2017, has spent a decade creating and promoting Israeli startups and introducing their technology to a global audience. But he got his first real taste of science and technology when he entered junior high school.
Born in Moscow, Michlin and his parents immigrated to Israel when he was 2 and settled in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak. He attended a religious elementary school, where he excelled, and when it came time to pick a middle school, Michlin became the only one from his peer group not to attend a yeshiva.
“I specifically selected AMIT Bar Ilan because of their emphasis on sciences and computers that I really liked at that time,” said Michlin. “I was the only one from my school who went to AMIT, and it required me to go to school by bus, but I didn’t mind.”
Milchin, now 48, said that what he most appreciated about the school was its approach to education. “The learning community there was productive and open, and there was no pressure,” he said. “That laid the foundation for taking initiative and flexible thinking—it was excellent.”
He added that students were given the freedom to pursue the subjects that most interested them, and he remembers the teaching staff as outstanding, which helped inspire the students and motivated them to aim high. (That positive impression stayed with Michlin for so long that his two sons continued the AMIT tradition, attending Yeshivat AMIT Amichai in Rehovot.)
L-R: Michlin, Roth, and Zangen
Abraham Zangen and Yiftach Roth were in the same grade as Michlin, but they were in the school’s biotechnology program, which was considered a trailblazing course back then—so much so that an AMIT newspaper at the time ran a feature on it and pictured Zangen and a friend holding a test tube.
“We were pioneers at that time in the 1980s in such a program,” said Zangen.
Zangen, 48, knew even then, in the mid-1980s, that he wanted to be a scientist. Yet it was only in his senior year, after reading “Body and Mind: The Psycho-Physical Problem” by renowned philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, that he decided to zero in on the human brain.
After graduating in 1987, the classmates went their separate ways. Michlin became an officer in the Israel Defense Forces’ elite Unit 8200, which has been called “probably the best school for entrepreneurship in the world, spawning hundreds of game-changing tech startups.” Michlin took a break from technology after the army, pursuing law and economics at university before becoming a commercial lawyer, mainly for Teva, Israel’s pharmaceutical giant.
Zangen, meanwhile, went into the Atuda program, which allows participants to defer army service and attend university to pursue an undergraduate degree—in his case, a bachelor’s in pharmacology at Hebrew University.
Zangen later earned his master’s and Ph.d., which focused on the mechanism by which antidepressant medications work, and went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.
“During that time, I started to be interested in how electrical stimulation of specific brain regions can affect behavior related to addiction,” he said. Zangen found that stimulating sites in the brain’s reward system induced behavioral changes. When he began working on the early incarnation of the electromagnetic coil that today is at the heart of Brainsway’s technology, he realized he needed a physicist to help him refine the concept. He reached out to his old classmate Dr. Roth, in Israel, who by then had become his brother-in-law.
Once Zangen and Roth perfected the coil and the NIH realized its great potential, the agency patented the coil in 2002 and a year later, it granted Brainsway, then a startup, the exclusive license to the technology.
As Brainsway continued to grow in the following years, Michlin would receive an invitation to return to Israel’s burgeoning high-tech and startup scene as the president and CEO of Yissum, Hebrew University’s technology transfer company.
“For me, this was a great step into the business world,” said Michlin, “because it was a bridge between scientific aspects, commercial aspects, legal aspects. In my eight years at Yissum, we created 120 startups and two investment funds—one in biotech and one in agriculture.”
Michlin took on that role in 2009, and spent the next eight years creating and promoting Israeli startups and disseminating their technology internationally. He joined Brainsway as a board member in 2015, and when the company launched a search for a new CEO the following year, Michlin was an obvious choice.
“The reason that I came to Brainsway is, first of all, because I highly believe in the company, but also because the scientific founders of Brainsway both studied with me at AMIT Bar Ilan,” he said.
Two months after Michlin became CEO, Brainsway announced positive results in a multi-center study on the use of Deep TMS for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, and filed for FDA approval to market the device for OCD this year. Brainsway also has its eye on tackling post-traumatic stress disorder, bi-polar disorder, smoking cessation, and addiction to everything from alcohol to opioids.
Zangen, who currently heads the brain stimulation and behavior lab at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, and Roth, Brainsway’s chief scientist, continue to work on applying their technology to other conditions, and are testing 14 different configurations of the electromagnetic coil.
Zangen’s hope is that Deep TMS will become the leading treatment for psychological and neurological disorders, and that it will be the preferred treatment over medication in the not-so-distant future.
While the scientists who got their start at AMIT Bar-Ilan’s biotechnology program are hard at work finding additional potential uses for their cutting-edge innovation, their old classmate Michlin is hard at work bringing it to the global marketplace and is looking to expand Brainsway’s presence in Europe, China, and other parts of Asia.
“The nice thing about Brainsway is that we are dealing with cutting-edge technology, we are really helping the patients, and we are really helping the world,” said Michlin. “The company is growing, and the future is ahead of us.”
