Cognos Therapeutics was founded in 2016 to take the developmental work that Josh Shachar and his team had made in creating an implantable SMART drug delivery technology and begin the process of bringing the technology to commercialization. The main challenge that Josh was attempting to solve was how to better deliver therapeutics to a patient where drug delivery was not optimally effective, such as the case with chemotherapeutics for brain- and blood-based tumors, other central nervous system issues such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and where delivery needed to be exactly targeted, such as breast and ovarian cancer. In addition, Josh envisioned an implantable system that would free the patient from the hospital or treatment center, provide for long-term-treatment protocols and provide the physician and the patient the ability to monitor the therapy’s effectiveness to the disease and to be able to adjust the treatment wirelessly and remotely.

“In creating a better tool for the physician, we are creating a better life for the patient.”
– Josh Shachar.

The idea for a SMART Implantable Pump was envisioned by Josh in 1999 and in 2003 he filed the first patent for his idea titled “Apparatus for Piezoelectric Layer-Wise Pump and Valve for Use in Local Administration of Biological Response Modifiers and Therapeutic Agents.” At the time, the pump was targeted to patients suffering from Leptomeningeal Carcinomatosis (LC), an extremely deadly form of brain cancer. He created Pharmacvo-Kinesis Corporation to be the incubator for the research and development work and was able to raise enough capital to bring the vision from an idea to a functioning first prototype to provide regulatory proof-of-concept. Over the next 15 years, the pump underwent many iterations and refinements resulting in an additional 45 patents being filed and the expansion of the idea to simply deliver chemo-therapeutics for LC patients, to a device capable of enhancing the wide array of disease treatment issue listed above.

Once the pump reached the level where commercialization was possible, Cognos was formed and is now the driver for moving all the required regulatory and initial clinical trial studies to completion in order to begin the first-use licensing agreement with a major pharmaceutical company for use of its implantable pump, now called SINNAIS, for the delivery of Methotrexate for patients suffering from LC.