The first tenant has been confirmed for the Life Sciences Park at San Ġwann: a local company will be taking up 800sq.m. in the coming months to focus on research which could lead to commercially-viable products.

The company, AAT, has grown phenomenally in just three years. The founder, Adrian Attard Trevisan, combined the expertise gleaned from his degrees in audiology and engineering, as well as his doctorate in neurosciences and soon human physiology, to come up with a treatment for autism.

“While I was working at the European Space Agency on a brain-interfacing project, I used to spend the weekend with a friend whose six-year-old son was autistic and would just cycle and cycle around the house. I wanted to find a way to help him get better,” Dr Attard Trevisan said.

After seven years of research, the solution was a headband with earphones, which is worn for just 40 minutes a day.

The easiest way to explain how the Mente headband works is to compare it to noise-cancelling headphones. The headband has EEG (electroencephalography) sensors which reads the brain waves of the autistic child – it is most effective when its use starts before the age of 12 – and creates sounds which dampen the errant Delta waves that cause some of the problems associated with autism.

Results are uploaded, with patient consent, to the cloud so that patients can be monitored from Malta, as well as by the patient and his or her medical team.

The headband has been a tremendous success in just 18 months and Dr Attard Trevisan said that the improvements seen in its users have been “dramatic”.

Adrian Attard Trevisan, founder of AAT

However, it is easy to forget the challenges of starting up something so innovative. He actually financed the company by selling his house, which he admits was a “very tough choice”, eventually bringing on board a few enthusiastic shareholders who believed in his quest – and who brought in more pragmatic skills that he happily admits he does not have. Since then, he has turned down numerous full-time jobs, and although he lectures in both Milan and Malta, AAT is clearly a vocation and not a job.

“I preferred to be on my own. It is so frustrating when you get heavily involved in a project but then have to watch everything grind to a halt because funding runs out!” he said.

He started with just two people and the group has already grown to nearly 20 full-timers, with a company producing the autism device, a research arm, a service provider for clients seeking insight into neural responses and a company dealing with patents.

The research arm found a lot of closed doors in Malta, but its success has since managed to prise some of them open

Production is already running at 200 units in the past eight months and demand is growing exponentially thanks to the appointment of distributors in 13 countries and exposure from conferences and peer reviews.

The research arm found a lot of closed doors in Malta, but its success has since managed to prise some of them open. It was, however, recognised in Milan as a research centre – the Institute of Human Physiology and Cognition.

“We do research and sponsor PhDs and any products coming on to the market from this remain our intellectual property,” he explained.

Dr Attard Trevisan’s researchers must, as part of their employment contract, publish regularly in international journals and attend conferences to present clinical results.

“Sometimes I have to remind myself how far we have come. Even large companies have problems getting FDA approval in the US so it amazing that we managed,” he said.

Clinical trials are now being run at Inspire on a larger scale, making the findings more statistically significant.

The AAT group will be moving its research arm to the new park, which is being driven by Malta Enterprise.

“We will have four state-of-the-art laboratories, representing a heavy investment, which we are funding through retained profits. However, a new round of investors is being sought,” he said.