Happy Wednesday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Lucy Jung, Co-founder of Charco Neurotech, a startup helping people with Parkinson's based in the UK.
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Here’s what Charco Neurotech is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
By talking to people with Parkinson's and their friends and families, we identified three main problems:
Parkinson's causes movement symptoms such as tremors, stiffness, and slowness, that have a major impact on daily life.
Secondly, taking medication on time is very important for symptom management but it is difficult to always take medication on time during daily life.
Parkinson's causes various symptoms that are incredibly hard to track but could be valuable information to the clinician.
The Solution:
Our vision is to help bring smiles back to people with Parkinson's. We have created a medical device, the CUE1, that sits on the sternum, and through mechanical stimulation enhances movement for people with Parkinson’s. The CUE1 also provides medication alerts to the user. We have also built an application that works hand-in-hand with our device that allows patients to track other symptoms in a gamified manner, and to easily communicate them to their clinician.
The Team:
We are two co-founders, myself and Floyd Pierres. Floyd has a medical background, while my background is in industrial design and engineering. Our skill sets are very complimentary in this regard for the problem we are solving. The rest of the team joined along the way, all because they believe in our vision just as much as we do. We're now a team of 15 people, focussing mainly on launching the device, clinical trials and community support at the moment.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I studied Industrial Design during my undergrad, and I soon realised that I wanted to use the skills I had to benefit other people. I started working in the field of incurable diseases and decided to work on Parkinson's through a project in my Innovation Design Master's degree. I stayed focused on Parkinson's because I found this technology that had the potential to help people immensely. Our project ended up getting some public attention, and people with Parkinson's started reaching out to us to find out more about the device. At the time, however, it was simply a project at university, and we were not planning to produce the device on a large-scale. In the subsequent years, I had to take time out of work and education because I had to go through my own health issues. Having to go through an invasive surgery taught me that if there's anything that we can do to help people who are struggling, we must do it.
When I came back after a few years, I noticed that the technology hadn't been picked up as expected, so we decided to do it ourselves. Floyd and I spent time researching potential applications and surveying people with Parkinson’s. His medical background and my design engineering background combined well together to create something both useful and practical.
Fun fact: We decided to name our company Charco, after Professor Charcot who discovered the benefit of stimulation for people with Parkinson’s in the 19th century, the technology which our device is based on. He noticed the effect of mechanical vibration on the patients because the patients that travelled to him by carriage showed improved symptoms when they arrived to see him.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Every hour two people are diagnosed with Parkinson's and it is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative condition. Unfortunately, currently there is no cure and only limited treatment options. Progress needs to be made to improve quality of life for people with Parkinson’s.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
Our greatest successes are whenever we hear from people with Parkinson’s and how the CUE1 has helped them in their daily lives. Recently, I received a little mosaic from one of our device testers, and she told us that through using our device she was able to make mosaics again. Moments like this are so special and continuously give us motivation to work hard towards our goal to bring smiles back for people with Parkinson’s.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
A very well known global shortage of components did affect us, so we are facing some difficulties in getting the components for our devices. However, our team has been working very hard to mitigate the issues . My dad always says that as soon as the risk is identified, it's not a risk anymore. And this is what we're trying to go by right now, finding mitigation strategies where we can.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I never had any intention of founding a startup, and so necessarily, I hesitated and really thought hard about whether or not I wanted to venture into this field. I somewhat regret hesitating, even if it was just a short period of time as I feel like it wasted my time to start the journey of helping people with Parkinson’s.
Also, another thing I would consider in hindsight is that the more you know about a problem, the more it might scare you away. So there is a great benefit in the unknown and simply addressing what is right ahead of you at any given time.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Being CEO is a role for me. Here's how a recent conversation went:
Mentor: "What do you think makes a good CEO?"
Me: "Isn’t a CEO’s biggest interest commercial success, and focussing on making profits for the business? That's not something that drives me.
Mentor: "And, what do you think a good CEO should be?"
Me: "I think CEOs should have, and work towards, a vision they believe in. They should also be driven by responsibility, and be persistent in their mission."
Mentor: "Then that's exactly what you need to become a great CEO."
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Be committed to the goal, not the process. If you work towards your vision, it doesn't matter if you have to pivot your approach multiple times along the way, as long as you keep getting closer to the end goal.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
You can overcome anything with the right support system, which is why the team is so essential to creating a successful company. They rely on you, and you can rely on them.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
My team inspires me every day, and I learn from them a lot. Their drive for our vision and their focus on the greater good motivate me every day.
I am also inspired every single day by our community. A 1% improvement might not seem like much in the medical space, but our community reminds me every day that a 1% improvement could mean one additional step taken and this can be a miracle.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Screw it, Let's do it - Richard Branson
This is a really interesting post for someone with Parkinson's.