The New Standard In Drug-Free Mental Health Therapy

XISTA TALK // Alessandro Venturino - Syntropic Medical 

Mental health disorders, like depression, are one of the biggest challenges of modern society. Since 2019, in USA and EU, the prevalence of depression has risen by 28% and approximately 70 million people receive antidepressants every year. Traditional antidepressants cause severe side effects and more than 30% of the patients fail to achieve remission. Ketamine is a very effective drug for the treatment of depression, but, given the high short and longterm dissociative effects, can be administered to a limited group of patients. The Siegert group discovered that repeated ketamine exposure promotes extracellular matrix remodeling and juvenilelike plasticity induction. Interestingly, the exposure to pulsed light at 60 Hz recapitulates the pharmacological effect of ketamine non-invasively (Venturino et al., Cell Reports 2021). Further behavioral data showed that 60 Hz light entrainment was able to promote learning and memory and rescue social interaction in preclinical models of depression. Based on this discovery we founded Syntropic Medical, an ISTA spin-off company that aims to create the first medical device for the non-invasive treatment of depression. Syntropic Medical is a dynamic and fast-growing startup company founded by Alessandro Venturino, Sandra Siegert, and Mark Caffrey. Syntropic has completed the preclinical testing, and it’s now actively preparing for clinical trials for FDA approval. Syntropic recently received the AWS Seed funding grant.