Episode
Neurotechnology? For Cancer? (Ben Woodington & Elise Jenkins)
- Podcast
- Owl Posting
- Published
- Mar 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5600
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
Youtube: https://youtu.be/JAxkqb-nBWs Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BLZph2uGGUVphbNQ8NGPd?si=SVBSKJM8RdO4AhYzDa-ZfQ Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3OU5Zse Transcript: https://www.owlposting.com/i/189602943/transcript This is an episode with Ben Woodington and Elise Jenkins , who are the cofounders of Coherence Neuro . The pitch for Coherence is as follows: a brain implant that treats cancer with electricity. When I first learned of the company in mid-2025, it was such an alien thesis that I instinctively wrote it off entirely. This surely isn’t clinically plausible at all, maybe it will be one day, but certainly not today. Then, while I was in San Francisco, I met up with Nicole , Coherence’s chief of staff. After that, I was far more convinced that there was something real here, especially after she told me that the electricity ←→ cancer thesis already has some merit: Optune , an FDA-approved medical device developed by Novocure . This has been on the market for over a decade, and uses externally delivered alternating electric fields to treat glioblastoma. And it works! If Optune is consistently used, glioblastoma patients can live up to twice as long compared to chemotherapy alone. How does it work? Simple: the alternating electrical fields prevent fast-dividing cells from replicating by interfering with the physical process of cell division (specifically, mitotic spindle formation). After this, Nicole connected me with Ben and Elise, the cofounders of the company. It was an incredible conversation. During it, I was informed that cancer cells behave eerily similar to neurons : hijacking neural pathways, attracting nerves into their microenvironment, and forming synaptic connections with surrounding tissue. Given this set of evidence, none of which felt…