Vulintus was created in 2010 by co-founders Robert Rennaker and Drew Sloan while they were doing pre-clinical studies of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) therapies for stroke rehabilitation at the University of Texas at Dallas. At the time, the standard motor assessments for rodents were time-intensive, manually-scored skilled reaching paradigms. Being engineers, we couldn’t tolerate an inefficient system for long, and so we set out to automate fine motor assessments, creating MotoTrak. Other labs soon started asking where they could get a MotoTrak system and, in 2014, Vulintus received an SBIR grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to turn MotoTrak into an off-the-shelf commercial system.

Once researchers started learning about and using MotoTrak, their colleagues started reaching out to us to help automate their own time-intensive and low throughput behavioral tests. And so we continued on to create automated behavior systems for cognitive and memory function, food and water intake monitoring, activity tracking, and somatosensory function, with several projects supported by other NIH SBIR funding.

Along the way, we’ve hired more engineers, or rather engineer-neuroscientists like ourselves, who love to design and build in the name of advancing biomedical research. In 2019, Vulintus relocated from Dallas, TX to Lafayette, CO. At the same time, Dr. Rennaker left the company to form new, clinical-focused companies that are translating his VNS research to the bedside, with active clinical trials. The quality of the preclinical data, captured with Vulintus’ automated behavior systems, was a key factor that allowed those VNS therapies to go directly from rodent models to clinical trials.

Today, Vulintus is continually developing a broad catalog of automated preclinical behavior systems, with interfaces that feel familiar and state-of-the-art to researchers that routinely use mobile phones and internet-of-things devices in their daily lives. We pride ourselves on finding innovative ways to reduce the cost of pre-clinical research tools for investigators working toward the public good. If you have a preclinical behavioral test that’s slowing you and your research down, give us a call (or an email) and we’ll do our best to help.