Race Is On to Develop ‘Window-to-Brain’ Products : Medicine: Biomagnetic Technologies competes with the West Germans to market a device to diagnose and treat neurological and heart ailments.

In the late 1960s, a group of UC San Diego physicists developed an experimental tool called a magnetometer to measure the Earth’s magnetic fields. After seeing that there was ample demand for the device from other physicists, they formed a company now known as Biomagnetic Technologies to manufacture the product.

Twenty years later, that initial scientific device, which was once dubbed a physicist’s toy, has evolved into a biomedical instrument that could revolutionize how doctors diagnose and treat brain disorders. In the process, Biomagnetic Technologies has been recognized as a pioneer in magnetic source imaging, a method of devising a map of the brain and its functions.

But the publicly owned company is now in a product development race with Siemens, a much larger West German-based conglomerate, to come up with a marketable use for the technology. At stake is a huge market. There are 44 million Americans afflicted with functional brain disorders who conceivably could benefit from such a device, the company maintains.

Biomagnetic Technologies recently introduced a prototype product called a biomagnetometer that, by measuring magnetic fields created by the brain’s electrical activity, could give doctors a “window” into the workings of the brain, heart and neuromuscular system.

A wide range of studies are under way at various medical centers throughout the United States and Europe concerning its usefulness in diagnosis and treatment of brain and heart ailments such as epilepsy, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and sleep disorders.

“Once we prove applications, the (company’s) growth could be very, very fast,” said Biomagnetic Technologies President Stephen O. James. “We’ve got a unique technology that no one else has right now. It gives us time to try to commercialize this.”

The biomagnetometer is a computerized scanning device that consists of 37 independent magnetic field detectors housed in a thermos-like container. By measuring the magnetic fields, medical researchers can understand not only the source of where that electrical activity occurs in the brain but whether it is normal or not.

For example, epileptics whose seizures cannot now be managed by medication sometimes choose to have a portion of their brain surgically removed. The biomagnetometer has the potential to pinpoint the location of tissue that causes seizures, helping save as much healthy brain tissue as possible.

The market for such a product could far exceed that of magnetic resonance imaging, a medical instrument that provides an anatomic picture of the brain but is limited in that is does not measure brain function, James said. The new technology would complement magnetic resonance imaging and existing diagnostic high-tech devices such as ultrasound and computerized scans.

Electroencephalograms (EEGs), for example, measure electrical activity, but their signals are imprecise because they are altered by tissue and distorted by currents within the brain. In addition, the procedure for some patients can take up to two weeks and cost upwards of $20,000 when electrodes are implanted in the brain.

Magnetic source imaging, however, is considered non-invasive, as having no potentially harmful effects on patients. Procedures could cost patients as little as $5,000, James said.

Initial clinical results have been encouraging, said Dr. Christopher Gallen, a senior research associate at the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic.

If successful, the implications for the medical community are enormous, Gallen said. The biomagnetometer is potentially revolutionary because it provides the “ability to look at brain activity on a millimeter basis,” he said.

With the more precise measurements, clinicians and researchers hope to develop more specific and effective treatments.

The company was founded in 1970 by UCSD physicist John Wheatley and colleagues to develop magnetic sensing devices used for a variety of laboratory and commercial purposes, including the detection of subterranean mineral and oil deposits.

The scientific instrument, called a magnetometer, is still sold by the company to physicists, said Gene Hirschkoff, vice president for technology who has been with the firm since its inception, when it was called S.H.E. Corp. Hirschkoff and several others now with the company were students of Wheatley, who died in 1986.

The turning point for Biomagnetic Technologies came in the mid-1970s, when medical researchers approached it about using the magnetometer to study the brain. By 1982, refinements of the device had allowed UCLA researchers to pinpoint the location of brain tissue that was causing a patient’s epileptic seizures. That breakthrough led to the company’s strategic refocus.

To date, Biomagnetic Technologies has sold more than 50 of its devices at prices of up to $2 million or more.