Emilė Radytė is Designing Medical-Grade Brain Tech Women Want to Use

While many neurotechnology firms chase the biggest challenges of our time, from curing Parkinson’s to preventing Alzheimer’s, there is also power in addressing problems that have been underestimated for too long. Innovation doesn’t leap; it evolves along a steady path of increasing complexity. Emilė Radytė understands this all too well. Building on decades of innovation in neuromodulation technology, she set out to create a wearable that tackles an issue overlooked by many, yet no less important.

In 2021, the Lithuanian scientist founded Samphire Neuroscience to close the gender gap in brain health. In four years, Samphire has developed a transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) device that advances its mission of transforming women’s health with non-hormonal solutions. But in a world where menstrual and hormonal symptoms are still dismissed or underrecognized as serious cognitive concerns, Samphire faces a dual task: raising awareness of the problem and designing a medical-grade tool women want to use.

Bringing Ivy League Science to Women’s Health

Emilė Radytė’s academic career is one many would envy. She began her undergraduate studies at Harvard, where she studied neuroscience and anthropology. This same multidisciplinary focus now defines much of her venture building, blending social trends, like the rise of women’s health awareness, with technological advances in neuroscience.

Her interest in cognitive health was sparked while working night shifts as an emergency medic during her Harvard years. Across shifts, she saw that more than half of the calls she responded to were psychiatric in nature; patients in severe distress, yet met with systems unprepared to help them. What struck her was not only the sheer volume of these cases, but how invisible they seemed within the mainstream care system. For Emilė, it exposed a glaring gap in mental health care, one too urgent to ignore.

Samphire co-founder Emile Radyte

Emilė continued her multidisciplinary neuroscientific training at Oxford, where her PhD research explored the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation for major depressive disorder. Inspired by the promising results the technique brings to traditionally hard-to-treat disorders, and by the emergence of startups like Flow Neuroscience bringing brain stimulation to consumers, she decided against a career in academia, in favor of translating science into real-world solutions.

In 2021, she co-founded Samphire Neuroscience with Alex Cook to adapt brain stimulation technologies for overlooked but critical women’s health challenges. The name Samphire refers to a resilient coastal plant that strives and regenerates even in the harshest of conditions, an emblem of the resilience Emilė sees in the women who consistently face cognitive and emotional burdens during menstruation with few tools or innovations to support them.

The Nettle Headband: Tackling the Menstrual Cognitive Space

About a year ago, Samphire launched its first product: the Nettle headband. The device delivers gentle, low-intensity electrical currents through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). By targeting two key brain regions, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, involved in regulating mood and supporting mental clarity, and the motor cortex, which modulates pain perception, Nettle helps induce neuroplasticity and modulate cortical activity.

The headband is designed for short, regular use. Worn for just 20 minutes a day in the five days leading up to menstruation, it allows women to proactively manage symptoms ranging from PMS and menstrual pain to the cognitive fog that often accompanies hormonal shifts. Whereas women have long had to rely primarily on medication to manage their symptoms, Samphire is introducing a drug-free alternative.

Yet Emilė is quick to temper that this is a sudden breakthrough. “The innovation is relatively new, but it’s actually been around for 30 years,” she says. “The real difference is that it was only used in clinical settings, and now it’s becoming a little bit more commercial.” Flow Neuroscience, for instance, preceded Samphire by commercialising a tDCS headset to treat depression. But while Flow entered a space well-recognized in psychiatry, Samphire is charting new ground in what Emilė calls “the menstrual cognitive space.”

The Nettle headband and app

This novel positioning requires more than just selling a device. It requires educating consumers. “It’s not something people spoke about before. When you thought of menstruation, you thought of little girls and blood and learning about it for the first time,” Emilė reflects. “For me, this was always a brain problem. And I don’t yet see a lot of other people educating on that.”

According to Emilė, Samphire is addressing a broader, misunderstood issue in women’s mental health. “I think a lot of depression in women is miscategorized. It’s often linked to hormonal changes. So I actually think it’s very important for us to clearly say that we work in the broadly defined women’s health space. And within that, we’ll have a lot of people who also have major depressive disorder on top of whatever hormonal concerns.”

By narrowing its focus to women’s health, Samphire has quickly found traction. Its first year post-launch has brought a wave of engagement from early adopters, consumers eager for solutions that merge neuroscience with lived experience. For the team, that feedback is energizing. “It’s been super motivational for all of us, especially our engineers and scientists,” Emilė says. “Honestly, it’s the best job ever.”

Balancing Science and Consumer Desire

Samphire is part of a rising trend in consumer neurotech, bringing innovations once confined to the lab directly into people’s homes. Yet this mission comes with its own challenges. Principal among them: how do you design a product simple enough for everyday use by the average consumer, but robust enough to deliver true, validated medical outcomes?

Emilė is clear that Samphire is not just another wellness tool. “We’re medically regulated, which is different from consumer neurotech that doesn’t go through regulation, for good or bad reason,” she explains. Unlike companies free to play fast and loose with scientific claims, Samphire must uphold strict standards. “We need to conduct clinical trials, we need to have quality management systems, we need to hold ourselves to a very high scientific standard.”

“On the other hand”, Emile admits, “consumers are much more picky with the type of products they use. Having a shitty-looking product that doesn’t serve user needs would be really hard to sell.” Beyond scientific validation, the team must package complex medical technology in a product that looks good, feels intuitive, and remains affordable. “When you’re selling to an individual consumer, making them part with their money is very different from selling to a healthcare system that can calculate ROI.”

On: placebo, protocols, and personalization

On placebo:

Samphire tested Nettle through double-blind randomized controlled trials, using a placebo mode that mimicked stimulation with small pings at the start and end but delivered no current in between. Emilė acknowledges that placebo can play a role in the first month of using the device, adding to the early impact. But those effects fade. “Placebo is a great part of medicine as well,” she notes, “but when users are still reporting benefits after six months, we know it isn’t just placebo.”

On one-size-fits-all hardware: 

A second challenge regards building a tDCS headband that works reliably across different users. Positioning matters in brain stimulation, but Samphire’s targets, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and motor cortex, are relatively large regions. With five-square-centimeter electrodes, Nettle can afford more tolerance in placement than invasive techniques that demand millimeter precision.

On personalization:

What matters more than electrode position, Emilė stresses, is protocol: how often the device is used, at what strength, at what time of day, and at what point in the menstrual cycle. Breaks between sessions also shape results. To handle this complexity, the hardware stays standardized, but the accompanying app delivers individualized stimulation protocols, adapting to each user and ensuring maximum efficacy.

Emilė Radytė's Vision for Brain Health in Everyday Life

Like many founders, Emilė Radytė is driven by a mission rooted in a vision of the future. For her, that future is defined by the rise of consumer neurotechnology in tackling chronic health issues. “People are increasingly realizing that many of us are living with multiple chronic conditions over time, and that combining multiple medications and pharmacological treatments doesn’t always work,” she says.

Neurotech, she argues, offers a different path. “It’s a great way of reducing the number of medications you take, and the beauty of it is that you typically don’t need to increase the dose over time, because you’re using the person’s own nervous system.” In this future, she sees a wide spectrum of disorders, far beyond those linked to menstruation, addressed less with drugs and more with smart hardware tools paired with personalized software protocols.

This vision aligns with a broader trend: consumers becoming more educated about their own brain health. “I think in 10 years, everyone will recognize that, yes, you have your physical health, but you also have, not just mental health, but brain health as a key part of how you care for yourself,” Emilė predicts. Samphire is positioning itself to supply the tools for this shift, as awareness and demand grow.

Emile Radyte speaking at a conference.

The field itself shows no signs of slowing. “I think we’re still in the early stages,” Emilė says. “But if I look at the field over the last seven years that I’ve been part of it, it’s leapfrogged every single year. There’s been so much innovation, and I can’t imagine that slowing down as technology continues to advance.”

In that sense, the symbolism of the samphire plant, thriving and regenerating in harsh environments, extends beyond the company’s name. It captures the trajectory of neuroscience itself: once confined to the lab, now regenerating into a field where consumers are no longer passive patients, but active stewards of their own brain health.

About the Founder

Emilė Radytė is the Co-Founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience. She studied Neuroscience and Anthropology at Harvard and completed her PhD at Oxford, focusing on non-invasive brain stimulation for depression. Her early work as an emergency medic highlighted the gaps in psychiatric care and inspired her to translate neurotech into everyday health. Emilė has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 (Healthcare) and won Medical Innovation of the Year at Medica 2024 for Samphire’s Nettle headband.

About the Firm

Founded in 2021 in London by Emilė Radytė and Alex Cook, Samphire Neuroscience is a consumer medical neurotechnology company closing the gender gap in brain health. Its CE-marked Nettle headband uses safe, non-invasive tDCS to relieve menstrual pain, PMS, and related cognitive symptoms, providing a non-hormonal, drug-free alternative. With clinical trials at UCL and Monash University and early adoption across Europe, Samphire is pioneering what it calls the “menstrual cognitive space.”

Visit: www.samphireneuro.com