Overview

The Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering is an independent Swiss research foundation dedicated to translating basic neuroscience discoveries into clinical applications. Founded in 2014 by Swiss-American philanthropist Hansjorg Wyss, the center is located at Campus Biotech Geneva alongside EPFL’s Neuro-X Institute and other neurotechnology programmes. The Wyss Center operates as a non-profit foundation, structurally distinct from both pure academic research and venture-backed commercial development.

Mission and Focus

The Wyss Center emphasises translational research, intentionally positioning itself between academic discovery and commercial deployment. The center works directly with patient populations to understand clinical needs and iteratively develops technologies that address real-world limitations of existing treatments and devices. The model deliberately blends engineering, clinical neuroscience, regulatory expertise, and long-horizon philanthropic capital.

ABILITY Neurotech spinout

The Wyss Center spent more than eight years and approximately $50 million developing what became the ABILITY platform, a fully implantable wireless ECoG brain-computer interface with a 50 Mb/s transcutaneous optical data link, designed for chronic home use in patients with severe paralysis from ALS, spinal cord injury, and stroke. In March 2025, the programme spun out of the Wyss Center as an independent commercial company, ABILITY Neurotech, under CEO Rotem Kopel. In May 2026, ABILITY Neurotech received IMDD approval to begin the first chronic implantation study of the device at UMC Utrecht under the INTRECOM consortium. In July 2026 it reported first-in-human intraoperative recordings at TUM University Hospital in Munich.

Other research and partnerships

Beyond ABILITY, the Wyss Center was led from 2015 to 2019 by BrainGate co-founder John Donoghue as its inaugural director (Tracy Laabs became director on 1 July 2026) and has collaborated with international BCI research groups. The center sits within the broader Lausanne-Geneva neurotechnology cluster anchored on EPFL’s Neuro-X Institute, which has also produced ONWARD Medical (Courtine / Bloch brain-spine interface spinout) and Neurosoft Bioelectronics (Lacour soft-electrode spinout).

Patient-Centered Research

The Wyss Center explicitly prioritises patient input and long-term outcome measurement. Its research philosophy emphasises sustained engagement with paralysed individuals beyond short-term proof-of-concept demonstrations, which is reflected in the chronic home-use design ambitions of the ABILITY platform.