Brain Sentinel co-founder José E. Cavazos, MD, PhD, will receive the 2017 Distinguished Service Award from the American Epilepsy Society. The award will be presented on December 1 at the society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The AES has about 4,000 members and works toward ending epilepsy and its effects.
The society first set up the award in 1993. It honors an AES member for outstanding service to the field. Special weight goes to work that advances the society’s mission and serves its members. It comes with a $1,000 honorarium, which Cavazos is giving to the AES travel award fund for junior Mexican epileptologists.
Cavazos said he was deeply humbled, since the honor comes from his core professional society. He has attended AES meetings ever since his first one in 1989.
His career in epilepsy research, teaching and patient care spans nearly 30 years. He is a professor and assistant dean for the MD/PhD program at UT Health San Antonio. He also helped draft the 2008 law that created the VA Epilepsy Centers of Excellence. He works with the NIH and the FDA. He also sits on the editorial boards of Epilepsy Research and Epilepsy and Behavior. Over the years he has held many leadership roles at the AES and the International League Against Epilepsy.
His path to Brain Sentinel began with a string of chance meetings with Mike Girouard. Cavazos started consulting for him in 2009, and in 2011 the two co-founded Brain Sentinel, Inc. with others. Cavazos later served as principal investigator on the key clinical trial that led to FDA de novo clearance of the SPEAC System.
He said he joined the company because he saw a chance to reach more patients. In his view, epilepsy care has a diagnostic gap, since diagnosis often rests on unwitnessed and unreliable reports of seizures. Girouard, now the company’s CEO, said Cavazos’s grasp of clinical needs has shaped its research, product design and go-to-market plan.
Brain Sentinel is a privately held medical device startup based in San Antonio, Texas. Its product is the SPEAC System, short for Sensing, Portable sEMG, Analysis and Characterization. It is the first FDA-cleared, non-EEG system that monitors seizures through physiological signals. In 2017, Popular Science put it among its Top 100 Innovations and its Top 12 in Health. The system is currently available to the VA market.
