A Minneapolis medtech company betting that the next big drug isn't a drug at all - it's a wearable that hums ultrasound at the one organ you forgot you had.
Somewhere in Minnesota, a person with rheumatoid arthritis straps on a device the size of a small remote. It does not beep dramatically. It does not inject anything. For a few minutes it sends low-intensity focused ultrasound through the skin toward the spleen, and then the person goes back to their day.
That quiet scene is the entire pitch of SecondWave Systems. The company is a clinical-stage medical device maker working in a field it helped name: bio-ultrasonic medicine. The premise is almost suspiciously simple. Sound waves, aimed precisely, can nudge nerves and cells deep inside the body to behave differently - in this case, to dial down the chronic inflammation that drives autoimmune disease.
For a category that usually arrives with needles, side-effect warnings, and monthly co-pays, "a wearable that you can eventually run at home" is a genuinely different proposition. Whether it works at scale is the open question. The early data says it might.
"SecondWave is a pioneer in the emerging field of bio-ultrasonic medicine."
- The company's own description, and for once the phrase is doing real workModern medicine got very good at inflammation. Biologic drugs transformed conditions like rheumatoid arthritis from joint-destroying sentences into something far more manageable. The trouble is that the miracle is not universal.
About one-third of rheumatoid arthritis patients don't respond to standard biologic treatments, and many of those who do see only partial relief. For them, the options narrow quickly: rotate to another expensive drug, accept the side effects, or live with the disease. Biologics also suppress the immune system broadly, which is a blunt instrument for a precise problem.
SecondWave's founders looked at that gap and asked an awkward question. What if you could quiet the inflammatory signal without flooding the whole body with medication - and without surgery to implant anything? The spleen, it turns out, is a hub for the body's inflammatory chatter. Reach it noninvasively, and you might change the conversation.
"One-third of RA patients don't respond to standard biologic treatments, and many show only partial response."
- SecondWave, explaining why it exists in a single sentenceSecondWave was incorporated in 2019, but its story has a longer fuse. CEO Anuj Bhardwaj grew up around ultrasound - his parents founded an ultrasound company called the Ultran Group in 1977. He spent years leading it, watching the technology do industrial work like sensing and imaging, and quietly wondering whether the same physics could heal people instead of inspecting materials.
The bet got serious when Bhardwaj started collaborating with researchers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, a region thick with medical device talent. He teamed up with Hubert H. Lim, an endowed professor at the University of Minnesota and a neuromodulation specialist who became Chief Scientific Officer, and Jeff Heyman, a medical device operator with two decades in the industry, who became Chief Operating Officer.
It is a tidy division of labor: the ultrasound native, the neuroscience academic, and the operator who has shipped regulated hardware before. None of them invented the idea that sound can change biology. What they wagered was that they could make it precise, wearable, and credible enough for the FDA.
"The technology spent four decades inspecting things. SecondWave decided it was time it started healing them."
- A fair summary of the founding logicAnuj Bhardwaj's parents start an ultrasound company. Decades later, it becomes the unlikely prequel.
Work on low-intensity focused ultrasound's therapeutic potential takes shape with University of Minnesota collaborators and DARPA's SBIR program.
Bhardwaj, Lim, and Heyman formally incorporate the company in Minneapolis.
A regulatory green light to run clinical studies of the noninvasive device.
A study reports reduced disease activity with splenic ultrasound therapy - 10 of 13 participants benefited.
Treo Ventures and a healthcare strategic lead the round; clinical testing begins on a self-administration version.
The flagship is the SecondWave MINI, a noninvasive wearable that delivers low-intensity focused ultrasound to the spleen. The goal is to reduce acute and chronic inflammation without the patient ever breaking the skin. Around it, the company is building a broader platform - the same physics pointed at different nerves, cells, and organs for conditions ranging from rheumatoid arthritis to long COVID, pain, and even hearing disorders.
The roadmap that actually matters to patients is the home-use version. Today's clinical devices live in research settings. The next generation is designed with enough built-in intelligence for people to administer therapy themselves, which is the difference between an interesting study and a product someone uses on a Tuesday night.
A noninvasive, wearable ultrasound device that targets the spleen to reduce inflammation.
A scalable system applying focused ultrasound to modulate nerves, cells, and organs across multiple conditions.
An intelligence-enabled, next-generation version built for patient self-administration at home.
"The difference between an interesting study and a real product is whether someone can use it on a Tuesday night."
- Why the home-use device is the whole ballgameSkepticism is the correct default for any company promising to treat disease with sound. So look at what is on the record. In a pilot clinical study of splenic ultrasound treatment, 10 of 13 participants experienced benefit during the treatment period - a small sample, but a clear and welcome direction. The company says it has treated more than 100 patients across its various studies.
Money is its own form of validation. SecondWave has pulled in over $15 million in non-dilutive government funding from DARPA, NIH, ARPA-H, and the chemical-and-biological defense program JPEO-CBRND - the kind of backers who do not write checks for vibes. In April 2025 it closed a $7 million Series A led by Treo Ventures and a major healthcare strategic, with the University of Minnesota's Discovery Capital and Minnesota's SSBCI funds joining in.
A small pilot, not a Phase III. But for patients out of options, the direction is the point.
Credibility also comes from the company you keep. SecondWave has been a member of Johnson & Johnson's JLABS incubator and a participant in Fogarty Innovation's Company Accelerator Program - two of the more selective rooms in medtech.
"You do not collect DARPA, NIH, ARPA-H, and a defense program by accident. Someone with a budget believes the spleen is interesting."
- On the difference between hype and grant reviewTo improve lives with an innovative method to treat illness.
SecondWave frames its mission plainly: improve lives with an innovative method to treat illness. Unpack it and you find three quiet ambitions stacked together - therapy that is cost-effective, personalized to the patient, and free of the invasiveness and systemic side effects that come with surgery or broad-spectrum drugs.
That last part matters. A pill or an infusion treats the whole body to fix one problem. An implant requires a procedure and a permanent passenger. A wearable that aims focused sound at a specific target is, at least in theory, a more surgical approach to a non-surgical idea. The vision is bioelectronic medicine you put on rather than swallow - and eventually run yourself.
Bioelectronic medicine has been "the next big thing" for long enough to earn an eye-roll. Implantable nerve stimulators exist; companies have chased the vagus nerve for years. What SecondWave is testing is whether you can get a meaningful chunk of that promise without the implant - delivered through a patch, calibrated by software, and someday handed to a patient to use at home.
Get it right and the implications ripple outward. Chronic inflammatory disease is enormous, expensive, and underserved at the edges where drugs fail. A drug-free, repeatable, low-side-effect option would not replace biologics so much as catch the people biologics drop. That is a smaller, sharper claim than "we will cure everything," and it is more believable for it.
"The grand version of this story is bioelectronic medicine for all. The honest version is a wearable for the people drugs left behind. The honest one is enough."
- The case for paying attentionReturn to that quiet scene in Minnesota. A person with rheumatoid arthritis straps on a small device, sends focused sound toward an organ they rarely think about, and gets on with their day. No pharmacy line. No infusion chair. No surgery. If SecondWave is right, the most radical thing about the moment is how unremarkable it looks. That is usually how the useful technologies arrive - not with a bang, but with a patch you forget you are wearing.