Prapela grows out of Harvard research

Prapela, a US-based developer of medical devices for infants, officially launched out of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering yesterday.

Founded in 2017, Prapela has secured a licence for medical devices that administer stochastic vibro-tactile stimulation (SVS), a non-pharmacological therapy that relies on vibrations to help infants overcome neonatal abstinence syndrome.

Neonatal abstinence syndrome, which causes drug withdrawal symptoms, can occur when the mother has been taking addictive drugs such as opioid painkillers during pregnancy, and can lead to tremors, seizures, vomiting and poor sleep.

SVS is also expected to help premature babies suffering from cardiorespiratory problems resulting from congenital heart disorders and sleep apnoea, where breathing temporarily stops during sleep, or colic, inconsolable and frequent crying in an otherwise healthy child.

The technology has already been tested on infants suffering from apnoea and opioid exposure,  and is currently undergoing further trials with US government-owned research agency National Institutes of Health.

SVS works on the principle of stochastic resonance, the idea that white noise can bolster weak signals in neuron-controlled and other biological processes. 

James Niemi, lead senior staff engineer at Wyss Institute, led the development of the technology, building on research by David Paydarfar, a former associate faculty member at Wyss who now chairs neurology at University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School.

Donald Ingber, founding director of Wyss Institute, said: “We are all excited that the innovative SVS technology developed by our faculty and talented engineering staff is moving from the lab into the marketplace, where we hope it will provide a new therapeutic option for infants – the smallest and most helpless patients affected by this ever growing opioid epidemic.”