IF you think that Jersey’s biopharmaceutical industry is all about growing cannabis, then think again: one firm based in St Lawrence is developing a suite of products designed to help our brains cope in the overstimulated world we live in.
Design engineer and inventor Nicholas Rose moved to the Island two years ago and is building his business, iO.CO, in the Island.
His interest is neuroscience, and particularly how iO.CO can take that emerging multidisciplinary study of the nervous system and use it to develop products and technologies that improve our lives.
The business is built on the premise that modern life is pushing our brains to the limit – from the amount of time we spend on screens and in offices to the air we breathe and the quality of our sleep – but neurological health, he argues, is still one of the most overlooked areas in design and innovation.
Mr Rose and his team are therefore developing cutting-edge products aimed at improving the way we live, sleep and think.
iO.CO’s three initial products are State Mode – which is focused on the cultivation, growth and extraction of ‘functional fungi’ as a natural supplement to improve brain function; Airos Sleep – which is an engineered duvet and ‘sleep bag’ which promotes deep, restorative sleep; and ‘BMB’ [standing for ‘Body Mind Balance’] – which is an interactive balance board designed to improve how the brain and body interacts to diagnose and ward off neurological problems later in life.
The first of these is being specifically developed in Jersey – hence, iO.CO being part of the biopharma family in the Island.
Mr Rose said: “My interest in the field of behavioural neuroscience stems from my own lived experience of seeing the people around me, including my son, all struggling with various problems with what I could refer to as ‘neuro-stability’.
“This affects all of us: children with ADHD, older people with dementia and everyone in between, and I went on a journey to see if we could find better, natural products that actually can make a difference.
“So, five years ago, I started looking at the wonderful fungi kingdom and realised that we know very little about them – but what we do know is that it is not the fungi per se that are important but it is what they do: they can produce some very interesting compounds that interact with our neurochemistry in a wonderful way.
“You have the psilocybin / magic mushroom side of things, which I am very interested in, but in the shorter term we are looking at a group of medicinal mushrooms that can really help with things like dementia and behaviour problems, which afflict us all in one way or another, directly or indirectly.
“I think they’re potentially one of the most valuable crops in the world, and they can deliver a huge amount of benefit to people.”
Mr Rose said that State Mode was developing supplements containing naturally occurring compounds that have been consumed by people for thousands of years, rather than synthetic medicines.
That said, he added, the work of State Mode was still backed by hard, proven science.
He said: “When you follow the science, you see that when these compounds are taken to the right parts of the brain, they hit particular receptors and deliver some incredible benefits; this is not pseudoscience.
“Our products are not toxic, they are not synthetic; they are naturally occurring things that have been in our food chain for a very long period of time, and the science stacks up behind that.”
Asked what connected iO-CO’s seemingly diverse product base – from a fungi-based supplement which is sucked as a lollipop or lozenge to a high-tech duvet that regulates temperature and air quality – Mr Rose replied: “The link is that the brain is the driver of everything that we do and experience; it is the thing that controls how long we live, behave and how we metabolise and process things.
“We look at our range as a connected system: the first part is to prompt the brain with chemical compounds. People do this every day with caffeine or nicotine, but we think the most beneficial compounds in our overstimulated world are derived from fungi.
“The second part is sleep, which is an incredibly important neurological recovery process which is often taken for granted but very difficult to achieve properly in the modern world.
“And thirdly, our balance board is all about stressing and improving the performance another part of the brain called the vestibular system, which is the first to develop and the first to degenerate.
“That part of the brain sustains us through life, and like sleep, we totally take it for granted, until we start getting vertigo, losing our eyesight and our hearing, and we have our first fall, which is often the start of a painful journey which is also a huge healthcare cost.
“If we can start to track vestibular decline in our 30s and 40s, we can see the direction of travel and intervene much earlier, because late intervention often means a poorer quality of life, escalating bills and increased hospitalisation, which is an unsustainable model with an aging population.”
None of iO.CO’s products are yet available on the market, and one of the keys reasons that Mr Rose has moved to Jersey and recruited an initial team of four – including two locally born “brilliant minds” – is to trial them here.
He said: “With any product, before you bring it to market, it has to be robust, rigorous, and if you are going to articulate to your first customers, you need rigorous data, and that is what I’ve come here to do: to quantify and qualify to individuals exactly how these products will benefit them, as well as the state and the broader community.
“Jersey has a social economic diversity which is easily accessible: I can talk to the third sector, doctors, care homes, families who live with ADHD etcetera – and that can all be quantified and qualified, which is very useful for us.”
He added: “Many early-stage tech companies will bring products straight to market and hope that they work, but I do not want to be controlled by having to get revenue in quickly.
“What I want to do is make sure that if these products are out there, they work, they are robust, they are understood, and people can adopt them easily, because I think they are of that potential significance.”
The JEP was invited into State Mode’s laboratory in St Lawrence, where the company is working on developing its fungi-based supplements to improve brain health. There, surrounding the classic accoutrements of a lab: white coats, fridges, labelled bottles and jars, microscopes, petri dishes, technicians were growing the mycelium of fungi, including Lion’s mane, to extract its regenerative goodness.
Mr Rose grew up in London and moved to Jersey two years ago, attracted by its ‘sandbox’ qualities, having first been brought to the Island by some of his investors. However, experiencing the overstimulation in the UK that his products are trying to cure, Jersey had other advantages.
He said: “Jersey is a wonderful place with wonderful people and, for me, as someone who has come here to work, that is personally brilliant. The other thing is, I want to give something back to my adopted home.
“I genuinely mean this: with the trials that we are doing, we can transform people’s lives, we can help the healthcare system save money, diagnose people early and get them to contribute for longer.
“These are the things Jersey has to address. If it can be a sandbox and reap the benefits in the short term, then I think it is a win-win situation for everyone.”
Mr Rose added that as an entrepreneur-investor, he needed three things from the surrounding support system: agility, certainty, and efficiency.
He reflected: “That is what Jersey professes to have, and to a certain extent, it is true. However, I also need the Island to have a depth of knowledge that can tell me ‘yes, you can do that’ or ‘no, you can’t’.”
“This Island is fantastic but if we are going to attract more of this type of business and talent – and there is a significant amount of talent already here – you have to match that with the competent authorities in order to bring that agility, certainty and efficiency to bear, and in line with the people who are putting their money where their mouth is.
“Jersey has so much going for it and I would not want the Island to miss out – because It can really benefit from this in so many ways.”
