While attending Stanford University, physics major Kamran Ansari has found more medical experts willing to look at the neuromodulation device he created in high school and inform him about the next best move.
Ansari developed a piece of wearable tech, designed as a hat using pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) therapy, to alleviate his sister Nadia’s chronic pain after she was diagnosed in 2017 with a rare autoimmune disease called Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
The two then founded the startup FluxWear Inc. to bring the device called Shift to more people, with hopes of launching clinical trials for further study. The hat sends low-level electromagnetic fields to different areas of the brain to reduce inflammation that causes peripheral neuropathic, or nerve, pain.
FluxWear has since caught the attention of medical professionals across Orange County—such as former chief executive and chairman of Edwards Lifesciences, Mike Mussallem, and Dr. Michelle Khine, who teaches biomedical engineering at University of California, Irvine—and now Ansari has brought the venture to Stanford.
“I think it’s an environment where people support innovation and creation, and help,” Ansari told the Business Journal.
The university’s Director of Pain Research, Dr. David Yeomans, recently became a company advisor and is one of the experts helping Ansari consider the impact of the neuromodulation device to other processes in the brain beyond chronic pain.
Ansari is currently back in Orange County for summer break, checking in on the clinical trials with Hoag Hospital that began in late 2024. The Shift cap initially began testing in the hospital’s Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute until Dr. Steven Grossman approached Ansari about using the device for cancer patients with chemo-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN).
FluxWear has now expanded the trials to five Hoag cancer centers in the county.
And after running the non-invasive device by Yeomans at Stanford, Ansari also has his eyes on how the technology can be applied to Alzheimer’s disease.
“There’s a hypothesis that inflammation in the brain drives the stages of early Alzheimer’s,” Ansari said of Eagleman’s suggestion.
As a result, FluxWear started stem cell research with a group in San Diego trying to evaluate Shift as a treatment approach.
He sees FluxWear becoming a platform technology that can impact overall treatment related to inflammation in the central nervous system, “which is upstream to a lot of diseases and conditions,” he said.
As of August, FluxWear has done more than 16 cell line experiments to understand what the device is doing at a cellular level. Ansari said that the team will soon be submitting the data to the FDA, a process managed by his sister Nadia Ansari.
“Effectively what we’re looking at, and what we’ve been evaluating, is how does this device use extremely weak multi-directional magnetic fields to reduce the chronic inflammation or oxidative stress that drives not just the perception and central sensitization of pain, but other conditions, namely neurodegenerative diseases,” he explained.
FluxWear will be submitting for a “breakthrough device designation” with the FDA, according to Ansari.
He nabbed a Business Journal Innovator of the Year Award last September and was the youngest recipient to win at 19-years-old.
“I think as we understand the science better and follow it clearer, the understanding is that the mechanism is potentially more broad,” Ansari said of the Shift cap.
Ansari doesn’t want to appear unfocused.
“We’re not doing anything that the science isn’t pointing to,” he added.
