Ciatrix: Revolutionizing Brain Health Through the Science of Movement
After selling his photobiology company, physicist Zdenko Grajcar turned his attention to neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s. With Ciatrix he’s introducing a breakthrough device that connects the therapeutic benefits of yoga and qigong with clinical science and modern medical devices.
Written by Logan Plaster
The Challenge
There is a striking disparity in the realm of neuroscience. On one hand, researchers have spent billions of dollars conducting thousands of clinical trials with the goal of finding drugs that will stop the progression of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. By most measures, these clinical trials have failed. While a few therapies can slow Alzheimer’s progression, the results are underwhelming compared to the vast investments of time and money.
On the other hand, there are numerous low-tech strategies with incredible potential for improving brain health yet they remain unstudied and unfunded: for example, practicing yoga and breathing exercises, moving your body more, and eating healthier. The results of numerous clinical trials studying these activities are impressive, yet they don’t receive the attention and funding afforded to blockbuster pharmaceuticals.
One reason for this gap is that science has struggled to explain why these health practices correlate with brain health. Zdenko Grajcar is on a mission to bridge this gap by connecting the science of body movement – with a focus on yoga and breathing – to brain pathology. With his new company Ciatrix, he’s introducing a device that systemizes the body movements that help heal the brain.
But let’s back up a step, because this is one of the more unusual founder stories we’ve come across. It starts in Las Vegas.
Origin Story
Zdenko Grajcar was a physicist working in the world of LED lighting when he was contacted by a Las Vegas casino. They wanted to know if he could install lighting designed to manipulate their guests’ moods. Grajcar took on the challenge like the scientist he was and the result was a pioneering application of photobiology. By influencing people’s circadian rhythms, Grajcar’s lights could make them feel energized, happy, relaxed, or even hungry.
Realizing the greater power of influencing animal and human photobiology, Grajcar shifted his focus to the world of livestock and the food supply. He discovered how to use light to change animal behavior, how fast they grow, how many eggs a hen will lay, or how many piglets a sow can produce. Grajcar holds more than 200 patents related to these innovations. This was lucrative work and he was eventually able to sell his business to Philips Signify. That exit gave him the financial freedom to step back and ask himself, “What does the world need right now?”
That question led him first to migraines and then to Alzheimer’s disease. He’d suffered severe migraines since the age of 14, and had multiple close family members who’d been affected and succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Without any intention of starting a business, Grajcar poured his time and expertise into better understanding neurodegenerative conditions. He read the research, talked to experts, and attended conferences, following his scientific curiosity wherever it led.
“I decided to objectively look at the science and evidence. And what I found was absolutely stunning,” says Grajcar. "Out of around 2700 phase II and phase III clinical trials on Alzheimer's disease, literally 100% of them failed. Even the leading drugs that were recently approved only slow down the disease, with a bunch of serious side effects. There is no true disease-modifying therapy. We should ask ourselves if we are basing our research on a simple medical fallacy. If you have a flat tire and you change it 2700 times and you fail every single time, wouldn’t you revisit how you are doing it?”
Grajcar came upon a different cache of scientific research pertaining to migraines and Alzheimer’s. It involved the practice of yoga and qigong. He was surprised to realize that, unlike the 2700 pharmaceutical studies, most of these clinical studies were showing surprisingly positive results. He went deeper and pinpointed one particularly effective practice – a yoga breathing exercise called pranayama.
The scientist in him needed to know why these yoga movements seemed to be changing brain pathology and cognition. He asked a neurologist friend and she laughed at him. She had no idea why it seemed to work. Then he asked the president of a leading Alzheimer’s organization and they said the same thing. We don’t know how it works, and we do not want to give people false hope.
So he set out to find out the answer to that question and, in doing so, the company Ciatrix was born. He dove into the research and found a study where a group in Oregon looked at MRI scans while people did pranayama deep breath work. What they saw were waves of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) coming from the spine in correlation with the breath work, which was contradictory to what neuroscientists had been saying about the source of CSF.
"When I started looking at these MRI scans I saw something very interesting,” says Grajcar. “Is it possible that our spine acts as a pump for cerebral spinal fluid?” If true, that could be a breakthrough in brain health because CSF flushes the brain through the glymphatic system, carrying away the metabolites and neurotoxins, acting as an immune system signaling super-highway. The more he studied CSF the more convinced he became that the circulation of CSF operates like our other circulatory systems. Just as the rate of our pumping blood and lymph are increased through physical activity, maybe the pumping of therapeutic CSF could be manipulated and increased through movement.
One of the big unlocks for Grajcar was realizing that all of the studies looking at MRI scans studying the brain’s clearance system, also called the glymphatic system, were done while the subject was lying down and at rest. To really understand what was going on, he was going to need to find researchers who would study the flow of CSF while a person was in motion.
He proposed the idea he called the “moto-glymphatic theory” at a neurology conference in 2022 in Rome. It states that certain spine movements pump large amounts of CSF through the brain, thus flushing out potentially toxic metabolites, including beta-amyloid plaques that have been correlated with Alzheimer’s disease.
“They laughed me out of the building because I wasn’t a doctor,” says Grajcar with a chuckle.
But there was one group who didn’t laugh. A team of researchers from the University of Oulu in Finland, a globally renowned institution in the field of neuroscience. They developed a non-invasive brain imaging technique using near-infrared LEDs called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure CSF dynamics in the brain. If Grajcar’s theory was correct, they said, they’d be able to see it in their scans.
To perform the study, Grajcar had to create a device that would manipulate the spine in a highly predictable way. So he built a device that simulates the back-arching movements of Marjaryasana-Bitilasana (also known as the cat-cow yoga pose, first arching in, then arching out.
He sent the device to the researchers in Finland and then waited. One day he received a frantic phone call.
“When they measured it, they said, ‘Oh my God, what we see is just unreal. This is not supposed to happen.’ What they expected to see was the normal in and out flow of CSF. What they discovered was that the spine movement created huge increases in CSF pulsation.”
“It wasn’t a 20% increase in CSF. It wasn't 30%. It was like 15 times,” says Grajcar. All of this led him to a radical conclusion.
“Alzheimer’s is not a true brain disease. That's a reason why we can’t find a cure. Alzheimer’s is a motion disease. And suddenly, everything makes sense. When we are getting older, everything conspires to restrict our movement and the flow of CSF. We move less; blood pressure goes up, and atherosclerosis sets in. It also aligns with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles.”
The Accidental Product: Yoga Deconstructed
The mechanized device that Grajcar built for the study wasn’t intended to be a consumer product, but after he saw the results, he knew he needed to make it available to people. While it could be tempting to simply tell people to move their bodies and “do more yoga” Grajcar was concerned about the folks who were more advanced in their disease. How could he help them? He was thinking specifically of his friend’s mother, who has stage five Alzheimer’s and kidney disease. She can’t do yoga. But she can sit in this specially-designed chair and have her spine flexed in and out, mimicking the movement of deep breathing.
To be effective, people have to use the device for 45 minutes at a time, which Grajcar worried would be exceedingly uncomfortable. What he found shocked him. People who used the device often fell asleep within five minutes.
“But they swear they are not asleep,” says Grajcar. “So we measured their brain activity and discovered the machine was putting them into an alpha and theta brain state. What we didn’t know is that repetitive spinal movement acts as incredible brain stimulation. It’s hypnotic and very therapeutic. We call it yoga deconstructed.”
Next Steps
Grajcar never intended his deep dive into the brain to lead to another business venture. But now he sees himself as sitting on a discovery that the world needs to have access to. So, he’s embarking on a series of clinical trials, but he’s funding it in a different way. He’s making the clinical trial process transparent and then plans to open it up for crowdfunding.
Ciatrix has a hill to climb. There is the stigma around non-pharmaceutical interventions like yoga and breathing exercises. There’s the massive medical device industry, which will sometimes purchase a competing product just to put it on the shelf. And there are the high costs of clinical validation, regulatory approval, and marketing.
But Grajcar is ready for the challenge. He’s building on the financial success and scientific achievements of his previous ventures, and he’s assembling a team on two continents who can produce and validate the product.
Zdenko Grajcar is on a true health moonshot mission, not just to treat Alzheimer’s and other brain conditions but to completely revolutionize how we think about brain health. If diseases of the brain are fundamentally movement disorders, how will our understanding of therapies change? What new discoveries will unfold?
That’s a question we’re excited to help Zdenko and his team answer as part of StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community.
Connect with Ciatrix via email
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Published: Jan 9, 2025
