WASHINGTON, D.C. — Maria Bennett is attending a White House briefing and a reception on Capitol Hill this afternoon — not the usual activities of a biomedical engineer-turned-CEO.
Bennett is being honored by Springboard Enterprises in Washington for her entrepreneurial leadership of SPR Therapeutics LLC, a medical device developer recently spun out by NDI Medical LLC in Highland Hills.
“They’re a not for profit organization that matches up the female-led companies with venture capital or other investors,” Bennett said Tuesday, explaining Springboard. “So they try to provide education and training to females that are leading companies about how to best form your message to investors, and how to wisely raise that capital you need.”
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Bennett expects to network with would-be investors during the reception, but she’s already done quite a few investor pitches trying to raise between $6 million and $8 million for SPR Therapeutics. SPR, which stands for Stimulation for Pain Relief, needs the money to do clinical trials of its implantable neurostimulation device that alleviates the chronic shoulder pain of stroke victims.
Bennett started working on the device technology about a dozen years ago while she was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Engineering. After earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering management at Miami University of Ohio, the Indianapolis native jumped right to the biomedical engineering master’s program at Case Western.
“In school, I really liked math. My dad is a civil engineer, so I knew a little bit about engineering,” Bennett said of her non-traditional choice of study. Many women don’t like math or engineering.
Bennett got interested in neurostimulation — using low levels of electricity to stimulate muscles and nerves — while working with a cerebral palsy sufferer at Miami. “We were developing a wheelchair for him that would allow him to move around better,” she said. “So the interaction that I had with him spawned my interest in … the biomedical field where there would be opportunities for designing devices that would ultimately help people.”
At Case Western, Bennett worked with Hunter Peckham, professor and interim chair of the university’s bioengineering program and director of the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center. Peckham is known world-wide for his work in developing technologies that enable paralyzed people to regain their ability to perform daily tasks, according to a recent center release.
At the time, an investigator at the center was working on a device to treat post-stroke shoulder pain. “So it ended up being my Master’s thesis project,” Bennett said of her help to develop the device. “We invented this product that showed by stimulating the muscle, you could treat their pain.”
While in graduate school, Bennett started to work for NeuroControl Corp., a neurostimulation device developer that no longer has operations. That’s where she met and started to work with Geoff Thrope, a neurostimulation researcher and executive who now is president and chief executive of NDI Medical.
“I got into the clinical studies aspect with the company,” Bennett said. “That’s what I really enjoyed … going out, working with the patients, working with the physicians, trying to develop the optimal technology for them, and seeing the results first-hand was very rewarding to me.”
Soon after NeuroControl started to have business troubles, Bennett left to take a job at Boston Scientific’s clinical studies group in Minneapolis. “That was a great opportunity to work for a big medical device company, leading clinical studies,” she said. “I ran a very large clinical trial there and had a successful market clearance from the (Food and Drug Administration) for that product.”
Bennett kept in touch with Thrope, who left NeuroControl to start NDI Medical, which is an incubator for neurocontrol technologies. She soon decided to rejoin Thrope. “It was very intriguing to me to have the opportunity to come back into the neurostimulation field, back to Cleveland,” she said.
Thrope was glad to have her back. “She was extraordinarily successful. She got awards at Boston Scientific for the type of clinical studies she was running. She got a product to market. And I was fortunate enough to hold sway over her and entice her back to NDI Medical, to Cleveland,” he said.
“It would have been a huge loss for Cleveland had we been unable to recruit her back because her fortunes were really going to be in becoming a very successful executive in a large company, probably in Minneapolis, which was the traditional route (for) most people of Maria’s talent,” Thrope said.
At NDI, Bennett was involved with developing the company’s first product — a bladder pacing device called MedStim, which was sold to medical device giant Medtronic in Minneapolis for $42 million last year. MedStim electrically stimulates nerves that control bladder function.
While looking for their next thing, Thrope suggested to Bennett that she go back to her master’s thesis project — the stimulator that treated chronic pain caused by strokes. “So for the last year, I’ve been in that business at NDI, getting all the value marks checked off,” Bennett said.
Combining her patented technology with NDI’s platform for implantable devices has yielded “this really great opportunity” that can be used to treat not just episodic pain but chronic pain, she said. That opportunity needed a leader. “I looked at Maria and said, ‘You’ve got the passion, the talent, the motivation, the demonstrated leadership, and it’s your turn to step up and run your own company,'” Thrope said.
So NDI spun out SPR Therapeutics several weeks ago, and Bennett’s been running it and trying to raise money to run its device trials. Thrope gave her the reins of the company because she’s the right leader for the job. But Bennett also has an exceptional talent for overcoming obstacles, said Thrope, who tells a story about the on-again-off-again development of the pain-relief device.
“In a previous company, she had a championed a pain therapy. The interactions with FDA were not stellar,” he said. “She could have stepped back from that and said, ‘Let me leave that alone. It’s a failure, and I’ll never come back to it.
“She set it aside. She completed all the studies. And she came back at NDI with a different approach to bringing the same relative therapy to market, but with an advanced technology and a much more traditional approach to the FDA, which they’ve accepted,” Thrope said.
“I’m thrilled about what Maria’s done and what she is capable of,” he said. “My adage is, hire people who are better than you, and she’s definitely better than me. She deserves this.”
