Background

Mariska Vansteensel, PhD, is a clinical neuroscientist at University Medical Center Utrecht (UMC Utrecht) in the Netherlands. She is a clinical investigator in implantable brain-computer interface research, with a focus on patients with severe motor impairment and locked-in syndrome.

INTRECOM consortium

Vansteensel serves as clinical lead of the INTRECOM consortium chronic-implant BCI programme. INTRECOM brings together UMC Utrecht (clinical site), the Technical University of Graz in Austria (follow-up site), Swiss BCI company ABILITY Neurotech (device sponsor), and German implantable electronics manufacturer CorTec. The consortium received Investigational Medical Device Dossier (IMDD) approval from the Medical Research Ethics Committee (MREC) NedMec in the Netherlands on 26 May 2026 to begin the first chronic implantation study of ABILITY’s fully implantable wireless optical-link ECoG BCI in ALS patients at UMC Utrecht. The chronic trial, with UMC Utrecht and TU Graz as sites, is scheduled to start in Q4 2026.

Clinical perspective

Vansteensel has articulated the central clinical motivation for chronic implantable BCI research: for patients with severe motor impairment, the loss of communication is devastating, and implantable BCIs represent an important step toward restoring a reliable means of interaction and independence for people who are otherwise locked inside their own bodies. UMC Utrecht is recognised as one of the leading European centres for clinical BCI research, with a track record of prior implantable-BCI work that supports its central role in INTRECOM.