Q&A with Don Vaughn
CEO of Ampa Health
Satori Neuro: For those who don’t know—because you’ve been in stealth for a while—could you describe what you are building over at Ampa Health and why?
Dr. Don Vaughn: We are in the middle of a mental health epidemic that only seems to be getting worse, and the current solutions out there are not solving it. So my co-founder, Dr. Jonathan Downar, and I created Ampa to build scalable brain stimulation technology that has the chance of eliminating and eradicating depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.
We are neuroscientists by training, and we think of the brain as an incredibly beautiful three-pound wet machine. Mental disorders come principally from that machine not being in proper balance with itself. So rather than ingest chemicals, it’s possible to take a brain stimulator that non-invasively uses powerful magnetic fields to deliver treatment to very specific parts of the brain. It’s called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. When that circuit is back into balance with the rest of the brain, people end up coming out of depression and anxiety in record time.
SN: How should we be thinking about the difference between chemical therapeutics and TMS as approaches to mental health?
DV: They couldn’t really be more different. The underlying issue is that particular circuits are not at their normal levels of activity. One option is to send in chemicals that affect every cell in the brain (and also many cells in the body). There’s not much precision and control there, so they come with a host of side effects, from weight gain to sexual dysfunction.
What’s worse is that they aren’t particularly effective. The first one you take has only about 33% likelihood of being effective, and it goes down rather precipitously from there. The non-invasive brain stimulation approach takes more work than swallowing a pill, but the payoff is very precise, effective treatment without a long list of side effects.
SN: A little bird told me that in the course of your research, you recently made a breakthrough discovery. What was that all about?
DV: Yes! For context, over the last 20 or 30 years, it has typically taken about 36 days of brain stimulation to complete treatment. People approached it like a daily medication, and it would take them about eight weeks to fit in that many sessions. Insurance currently approves and reimburses this one-session-per-day approach.
Speaking now as a neuroscientist rather than co-founder of Ampa, we have just published results showing that it seems possible to deliver an entire course of TMS in a single day without sacrificing efficacy. One day TMS has been tried before with moderate-to-low success, but our unique approach was to potentiate the brain’s ability to rewire itself using a neuroplastogen—chemicals that promote neuroplasticity—while delivering 20 sessions in one day. The neuroplastogen acted like fertilizer in soil, and the treatments effects were both faster and more durable. We could hardly believe the near 70% remission rates we were seeing.
SN: What does the next year hold for Ampa?
DV: 2025 is really about meeting all the demand and interest we’re seeing for the product. We are taking to heart Paul Graham’s sage advice that he’s never seen a startup fail because it was too thoughtful about early customers. So we’re planting the seeds for scaling tremendously over the next several years and taking as much time as necessary with all of our early installs so that everyone’s experience is going to be phenomenal.
Even after people learn to deliver the one-day protocol in their clinics, we think there’s more to be optimized. We think there are probably many ways you can improve it, so we’re exploring several of those opportunities. At the end of the year, we hope to have a really solid install base, with 5,000 people who have been treated and are in remission, and a one-day protocol we are ready to take through regulatory and insurance bodies.
SN: Where do you see the future of TMS going?
DV: A lot of the science has now been de-risked, and we’re now looking at a technology that appears to get 70% of people into remission from depression in a single day of treatment. While this One Day treatment is not yet FDA cleared, we believe the science will lead it there shortly. Thus, the factors that have been holding TMS back are no longer doing so to nearly the same degree. So this is now a scaling play.
Our mission is a billion remissions in 10 years. Why isn’t it at your primary care provider, or in minute clinics, or—eventually in places like your home? TMS is definitely the leader in this space, but brain stimulation technology in general needs to move out of specialized spaces so everyone on the planet can have access to it for reduced costs.
With decades of research converging, the technology, clinical data, and patient demand are all aligning to make this the perfect time to scale non-invasive brain stimulation.