Three patients received a 30-minute test of Coherence Neuro's brain-tumor implant at Royal Melbourne Hospital

By Inside BCI · Edited by Velco Dar · June 23, 2026

A San Francisco startup with personnel ties to Neuralink temporarily implanted a brain-computer interface in three patients undergoing brain tumor resection surgery at Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, per a WIRED report by Emily Mullin published 23 June 2026. The implant was in place for roughly 30 minutes during each surgery and then removed. The procedures were the first-in-human safety check for Coherence Neuro’s electroceutical platform, which is designed to sense the unique electrical signals of brain tumors and deliver mild electrical stimulation to prevent their growth. The patients consented to the implant placement prior to their tumor resection surgery. The work is the foundation for a chronic-implant trial in glioblastoma patients that Coherence plans to begin in 2027.

What Coherence Neuro is building, and what makes it different from Optune

Coherence Neuro was founded in 2022 in Cambridge, United Kingdom, as Opto Biosystems Limited by Ben Woodington and Elise Jenkins, both PhDs from the University of Cambridge’s Bioelectronics Lab. The company is now San Francisco-headquartered with United Kingdom and Australian operations. It closed a $10 million seed round in November 2025, co-led by Artesian and Topology Ventures, with participation from Blackbird Ventures, Possible Ventures, XEIA and Jumpspace among others. The Australian operating subsidiary, Coherence Neuro Australia Pty Limited, is the sponsor of the first-in-human study registered on ClinicalTrials.gov under NCT07465796.

The device tested in Melbourne is CIPHER, a thin, flexible film of electrodes laid on the brain’s surface during surgery and removed before the operation ends. The device Coherence intends to leave in place is SOMA, a button-sized implant with up to 16 fine threads that extend into the tissue. No patient has received SOMA yet. Coherence positions its platform as BCI for brain-cancer monitoring and electrical-stimulation therapy, with the implant placed during the patient’s brain tumor resection surgery and intended to remain in place after the tumor is removed.

The closest approved comparison in the brain-cancer device category is Optune, made by Novocure. Optune is a wearable device first approved by the FDA in 2011 for recurrent glioblastoma, with the newly-diagnosed indication added in 2015. The Optune Pax variant received FDA approval in February 2026 for locally advanced pancreatic cancer in combination with gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel. The Optune device attaches to the scalp or abdomen with adhesive patches and improves survival by several months when worn for most of the day. Patients on Optune shave their heads and carry a battery in a backpack or on a hip belt. Coherence’s pitch is that an implanted device with continuous monitoring and customized stimulation can deliver the therapeutic effect without the shaved head, the battery backpack, or the visible signal of cancer treatment.

The Neuralink personnel ties

Matthew MacDougall, Neuralink’s head neurosurgeon, is named in the WIRED article as both an adviser to and an investor in Coherence Neuro. Rory Murphy, a neurosurgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona and an investigator on one of Neuralink’s clinical trials, is slated to be involved in future Coherence trials. Two senior Neuralink-affiliated neurosurgeons formally attached to a separate implantable-BCI venture is a structural signal about how the implantable-BCI clinical network operates: the surgeon community for high-channel-count brain implants is small, and the same names cycle across multiple companies’ clinical and advisory rosters.

Coherence says both will be involved in the US clinical trials it plans over the coming years. It has not named US sites.

The science of treating brain tumors with electrical stimulation

The premise of Coherence’s device is grounded in 2019 Stanford research showing that high-grade gliomas drive their own growth by forming synapses with healthy neurons. In that study, a seizure drug interrupted electrical signals to tumors and slowed their growth in mice. Separate research has shown that low-intensity electricity disrupts cancer cell division in brain tumors. These two pillars produce the therapeutic hypothesis Coherence is testing in humans: an implanted device that monitors the tumor’s electrical signature continuously and applies targeted stimulation to suppress tumor activity between or alongside standard-of-care treatments.

The clinical use case Coherence is pursuing is glioblastoma recurrence. Glioblastoma is the most common malignant primary brain tumor. Median survival across all US patients is about eight months, rising to 12 to 14 months for those who receive surgery and combined chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and about 7 per cent survive five years. Standard surveillance is an MRI scan every few months. Ben Woodington, Coherence Neuro’s CEO, told WIRED that the MRI interval is not frequent enough: brain tumors can become more aggressive suddenly, and clinicians lack visibility into what happens between scans. Coherence’s pitch is that a continuous-monitoring implant can flag rapid tumor growth in time for the clinical team to intervene with surgery before the next scheduled MRI would have caught it.

What’s next, and what the trial registry says about today’s status

The intraoperative safety check at Royal Melbourne Hospital is registered as NCT07465796, sponsored by Coherence Neuro Australia Pty Limited, recruiting from 22 May 2026 with an estimated completion date of September 2026. The trial’s registered title is “A First-in-Human Study of the CIPHER System During Brain Surgery for Newly Diagnosed Glioma,” with the device named CIPHER on the registry. Coherence markets the chronic platform under the name SOMA. Coherence says results from the CIPHER study will inform the design of SOMA-1, its second-generation device for long-term implantation. The registered trial covers short-duration use during tumor removal only. On 21 October 2026, Coherence said it will seek FDA Breakthrough Device designation.

The chronic-implant trial that will test the actual product hypothesis is the long-term SOMA study, which Woodington has said he expects to begin by late 2027. The 2027 trial is what the company needs to clear in order to convert the platform from intraoperative safety data into a real-world recurrence-monitoring and tumor-suppression device.

Where this sits on the BCI commercial map

The Coherence Neuro programme is a different commercial track from the BCI companies that have been most visible in 2026 reporting. Neuralink, Synchron, Paradromics, Precision Neuroscience and Neuracle are scaling implantable BCIs for movement and speech restoration, mostly in spinal cord injury and ALS populations. Coherence describes its platform as the first BCI built for cancer. Other device efforts in brain cancer include QV Bioelectronics, a UK company developing GRACE, an implant that delivers electric fields after glioblastoma surgery, and INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, whose graphene interface was first used in a patient during brain tumor surgery in 2024.

Two research programmes also target brain cancer with devices. Cahira Technologies, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sarkar laboratory spinout, is developing a brain-implant platform targeting cancer and Alzheimer’s, currently at mouse-stage. A 2023 Brigham and Women’s Hospital intracranial microdevice study led by Pierpaolo Peruzzi and Oliver Jonas placed drug-screening devices in six glioma patients and reported in Science Translational Medicine. The Brigham study screened drugs inside the tumor; Cahira’s devices deliver electrical stimulation and have been tested only in mice.

The 2027 permanent-implant trial is the next material milestone. If Coherence enrols and produces interim safety and tumor-modulation data within twelve to eighteen months of trial start, the company becomes a commercially relevant BCI platform in a clinical category the motor and speech BCI companies are not addressing. If the 2027 trial slips or produces ambiguous data, Coherence remains an early clinical-stage venture rather than a commercial test case.

Correction, 22 October 2026: An earlier version of this article described the device tested in Melbourne as a skull-mounted implant with 16 threads. The tested device, CIPHER, is a thin-film probe placed on the brain’s surface; no patient has yet received SOMA, the implant with up to 16 threads, and Coherence says CIPHER results will inform SOMA’s design. The article also overstated glioblastoma survival, said ALS patients have a multi-decade life expectancy, called Coherence the first BCI venture built for brain cancer, said Cahira Technologies does not use electrical stimulation, and misdated a MassDevice report published on 4 November 2025.

Sources

news Coherence-Neuro brain-tumor glioblastoma Royal-Melbourne-Hospital BCI-cancer Neuralink-ties Matthew-MacDougall Ben-Woodington Optune electroceutical CIPHER first-in-human

What Coherence Neuro is building, and what makes it different from Optune

The Neuralink personnel ties

The science of treating brain tumors with electrical stimulation

What’s next, and what the trial registry says about today’s status

Where this sits on the BCI commercial map

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