Truman Pierson always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur.
“I think a lot of the time for people who are interested in entrepreneurship, it is somewhat inborn,” Pierson said in an interview with the Maroon. “I get that question a lot—what would you do if you weren’t working on this? I’d probably be working on a different company, trying to start something else.”
Since graduating early last fall, Pierson has devoted himself to being CEO of Theta Neurotech, a startup he cofounded with two students from Vanderbilt University. The company aims to develop a wearable earpiece using electroencephalography (EEG) technology that alerts epilepsy patients 30 to 60 minutes before they have a seizure.
“Electroencephalography is a type of brain imaging technology utilized in clinics typically,” Pierson said. “What the EEG is doing is it’s monitoring the electrical discharges of the wearer’s brain. When your neurons are talking to each other and communicating with each other, they’re often communicating with electrical signals. Essentially what an EEG does is it picks up on that electrical signal emitted by neurons, and based off of that signal you can make determinations about the patient, how their brain is functioning.”
After producing a prototype earpiece, the company hopes to receive Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval within the next 18 to 24 months after two clinical trials: one at UChicago Medicine to determine whether the devices predict seizures as intended, and another larger, longer-term study to test their everyday use. Once the trials are complete, the company would focus on preparing for distribution. Pierson said Theta Neurotech’s product is especially important for the approximately 30 percent of epilepsy patients with uncontrolled seizures.
“Our goal is […] to provide [patients] with an early warning sign for the seizures, one, so they’re not getting injured, but two, so they can also take seizure rescue medication to prevent the seizure before it actually occurs,” he said.
Pierson credits his cofounders with providing expertise that was critical in the development of Theta Neurotech’s product. “Myself, my background is in computer science; I knew I could handle the load of the software side and the deep learning side,” he said. “My other cofounder, Ali [Hussain], his background is in neuroscience, in lab EEG research, so he had a lot of background understanding of the technology to start with. And our third cofounder, Chris [Fitz], is a chemical engineering student and has a deep understanding of the material science required for developing the hardware.”
Epilepsy wasn’t always the focus of Theta Neurotech, which Pierson, Hussain, and Fitz founded in June 2022. Originally, Pierson said, they hoped to create a “Fitbit for your brain.”
“I felt that was going to be an area of demand in the future on the consumer side,” he said. “But as we got a feel for the state of the research, we found a much more clear problem/solution in the epilepsy space. We knew that we could take this technology that we’d been working on and getting an understanding of and apply it to this specific-use case and help a lot of people.”
That process helped focus Pierson’s personal priorities at UChicago.
“My junior year was hectic—I studied abroad. I was also still playing baseball at the time. I still had to focus on class. It wasn’t clear yet that the company would find the right direction,” he said. “But my junior year summer, we found this much clearer need and something that we knew we could accomplish. So after that, I realized it was time to quit baseball, it was time to graduate early, try to get out of school as quickly as possible.”
Pierson has high hopes for Theta Neurotech beyond epilepsy.
“We’ve also started developing an algorithm that can automatically detect Alzheimer’s from EEG signals,” he said. “It’s important technology because [diagnosing] Alzheimer’s is expensive: it takes multiple tests, some of them are invasive, and then are often not accurate. So our goal is to be able to provide a low-cost mechanism for automatically detecting Alzheimer’s and then, given early detection, be able to actually treat Alzheimer’s and prevent the buildup of amyloid to ensure that it does not develop further.”
In the long term, Pierson said, Theta Neurotech could move toward products aimed at a wider consumer base.
“Doing brain computer interfacing, where people in general can interact with their phone or their computer just based off of their thought, whether it be thought to text or thought to image or thought to video, that’s the ultimate goal,” he said. “But epilepsy and Alzheimer’s are two primary focuses.”
