AURIMOD
Customizable Pain Therapy without Medication

Opioids bring short-term effectiveness in treating chronic back pain, but their overuse comes at the price of serious side effects like mental clouding, somnolence, addiction, and euphoria. Approximately two million people suffer from opioid use disorder (OUD) every year.

This has prompted health providers to reevaluate other options for pain management. AURIMOD is an innovative medtech company that has taken a significant leap in this regard by designing a non-pharmacological pain management solution, VIVO.

It is a single-use device using neuromodulation pain management techniques to relieve chronic back pain. VIVO is attached to the patient’s ear via three small needle electrodes to electrically stimulate the vagus nerve, one of the longest cranial nerves running from the brain to the large intestine. The nerve plays a key part in the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for relaxing the body after periods of stress. By externally stimulating the nerve, VIVO reactivates the body’s own pathways for pain relief.

VIVO is a step up from conventional non-pharmacological pain management devices for chronic back pain, like spinal cord stimulators. As the latter is an implantable device, patients need to go through invasive surgeries to get the spinal cord stimulator up and running. Besides, the device often shows post procedure complications like unintended movement and breakage of leads, which sometimes leads to serious injuries. Even without complications, the response rate of the stimulator may decrease over the years.

VIVO’s minimally invasive device overcomes these issues and paves the way for long-lasting and sustainable pain relief and improved quality of life.

This positive therapeutic effect can remain even after the patient has completed the treatment, which is another sizable advantage of the device. Using VIVO allows patients’ normal daily activities given its user-centric design.

The duration of its use varies from patient to patient based on their pain and the treatment regime specified by physicians. Only mild side effects have been reported using the device, and the treatment is usually tolerated well. In terms of pain management, clinical trials demonstrate that chronic back pain patients using VIVO over a period of six weeks observed 70 percent pain reduction and a 90 percent decline in opioid use.

The VIVO device is a prescription medical device, CE-marked, and already available on the market. It is currently sold via B2B channels to hospitals and physicians. Austria is the main market for the device for now, but VIVO is steadily expanding to Germany, Switzerland, and the Benelux region. VIVO is also awaiting FDA clearance to enter the U.S. market next year.

“To advance our portfolio, we are developing a smartphone app that will enable patients to keep track of their pain and quality-of-life as well as view VIVO device data and seamlessly share it with their physicians for remote management of their therapy,” says Stefan Kampusch, CEO of AURIMOD.

Future upgrades will include tools to measure motility, sleep quality, and other parameters while patients use the VIVO device, and with this, provide objective biomarkers on pain. AURIMOD also plans to add more user-friendly features that improve patient-physician collaboration. These tools will help physicians manage and optimize a patient’s therapeutic progress and promptly modify pain management strategies in case a patient isn’t responding to therapy.

Through these endeavors, AURIMOD’s VIVO is breathing new life into the drug free pain management landscape.