Sgt Lee Marten of the Vancouver Police Department, an ALS patient who has taken leave from active duty, can now control his phone and computer by thinking about it. Marten received a Neuralink N1 brain-computer interface at Toronto Western Hospital on 20 May 2026. CBC News (Lyndsay Duncombe byline, with an on-camera interview with Marten) and MobiHealthNews (Jessica Hagen byline, Executive Editor) both reported the story on 2 July 2026, following earlier Canadian tech-media coverage in mid-to-late June. Marten is the first Canadian ALS patient enrolled in Neuralink’s CAN-PRIME clinical trial. He is also, by materially larger significance for the field, the first human anywhere to receive the Neuralink N1 implanted via the company’s new transdural surgical technique.

The transdural technique places the microelectrode threads through an intact dura mater, the tough outer protective layer of tissue surrounding the brain, rather than requiring a durectomy in which the dura is surgically cut open. Every previous Neuralink human implant since the January 2024 first-in-human procedure on Noland Arbaugh had used the durectomy approach. Preserving the dura in place reduces the procedural invasiveness of a Neuralink surgery in a way that matters for both patient risk and for scalability of the surgical footprint. The surgical technique change had been publicly disclosed by Neuralink in prior corporate materials but had not been independently confirmed in a specific named patient until the CBC and MobiHealthNews reporting on 2 July 2026 identified Marten’s 20 May procedure as the first transdural human case.

The specifics of Marten’s implant

Marten’s procedure was performed by the CAN-PRIME neurosurgery team at UHN, led by Dr Andres Lozano, Alan and Susan Hudson Cornerstone Chair in Neurosurgery at University Health Network. The site is Toronto Western Hospital, Neuralink’s sole Canadian trial site. Health Canada originally authorised CAN-PRIME in 2024, making it the first Neuralink clinical trial approved outside the United States. The trial is designed to run for approximately four years.

Marten is the 26th person worldwide to receive a Neuralink N1 implant, per MobiHealthNews. Two prior Canadian patients received Neuralink implants at UHN before Marten, both under CAN-PRIME and both with cervical spinal cord injury indications rather than ALS. Those two surgeries took place on 27 August 2025 and 3 September 2025, per prior CBC and Global News coverage. Marten’s Vancouver-based residence is worth noting for the trial pattern: CAN-PRIME’s single Canadian site is in Toronto, and eligible Canadian patients are travelling to Ontario for the procedure. This mirrors the United States PRIME parent trial, in which patients have travelled from multiple states to Neuralink’s US surgical sites.

The trial name CAN-PRIME expands to Canadian Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, per Health Canada and UHN’s own materials. It runs as the Canadian arm alongside the US PRIME parent (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06429735), GB-PRIME at University College London Hospitals (NCT07127172, with seven patients confirmed enrolled per UCLH’s 29 January 2026 announcement), and UAE-PRIME at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi (NCT06992596). Neuralink’s international trial cohort is now visibly multi-jurisdictional.

Why the transdural change matters commercially

The transdural technique is a substantive engineering and clinical achievement, not a marketing distinction. Every prior Neuralink human surgery has required cutting the dura open, exposing the underlying cortex to the operating room environment, and then re-closing the dura around the implant. Durectomy is a routine neurosurgical procedure and durably safe in expert hands, but it carries measurable procedural risk: cerebrospinal fluid leak, infection, and inflammation at the dural repair site. The transdural approach threads the microelectrodes through the intact dura using the R1 surgical robot, leaving the dura’s structural integrity in place.

For Neuralink’s commercial trajectory, the transdural change addresses three specific bottlenecks. First, procedural time per patient. A durectomy adds surgical time; preserving the dura shortens the operation. Second, procedural risk profile. Every reduction in invasiveness lowers the threshold for informed-consent discussions with prospective participants and for regulatory approval of expanded indications. Third, surgical footprint scalability. Neuralink has publicly stated that its commercial ambition is thousands to tens of thousands of implants per year within the coming years. A less-invasive procedure is easier to train new neurosurgical teams to perform, easier to distribute across a larger number of sites, and easier to eventually push out of tertiary academic medical centres and into a broader hospital network. The transdural technique is the enabling procedural change for that scaling ambition.

The Chalmers-led Nature Reviews Bioengineering review that Inside BCI covered on 30 June 2026 identifies the surgical procedure itself, rather than the implant hardware, as one of the key throughput bottlenecks in the cortical prosthesis category. Marten’s 20 May 2026 procedure is the first published human demonstration that Neuralink has cleared that specific bottleneck for its own N1 device.

Where Marten sits in the Neuralink cohort

Neuralink now has publicly disclosed human implant participants across four jurisdictions: the United States (PRIME parent trial), the United Kingdom (GB-PRIME at UCLH, with seven participants confirmed at May 2026), the United Arab Emirates (UAE-PRIME at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi), and Canada (CAN-PRIME at UHN Toronto Western, now with three participants comprising two cervical spinal cord injury patients from August and September 2025 and Marten as the first ALS patient from May 2026). The total cohort of 26 participants as of Marten’s 20 May 2026 surgery represents the largest disclosed cohort of any Western integrated-wireless intracortical BCI company operating under a single regulated multi-jurisdictional trial programme. Blackrock Neurotech’s Utah array has been used across BrainGate academic collaborations for more than two decades, with a cumulative implant count above 40, though those procedures are distributed across multiple independent academic principal investigators rather than a single sponsor-led trial. In China, NeuroXess has reported a cumulative cohort of 54 flexible-electrode implants since the company’s founding, and Neuracle’s NEO system reported 36 confirmatory patients prior to its March 2026 NMPA approval. Synchron’s Stentrode has ten participants across the US COMMAND study and the earlier SWITCH study in Australia. Paradromics performed its first Connexus implant on a Michigan patient in June 2026, which Inside BCI covered on 17 June 2026. Precision Neuroscience has performed intraoperative demonstrations of its Layer 7 cortical interface but has not yet reported chronic implants at the Neuralink scale.

The indication mix is also worth noting. Neuralink’s first participant, Noland Arbaugh in January 2024, had a cervical spinal cord injury. Subsequent participants have included both cervical spinal cord injury and ALS indications across the US, UK, UAE, and now Canada arms of the PRIME trial family. Cervical spinal cord injury was the initial primary indication for the PRIME trial and remains the largest single indication in the disclosed cohort.

Regulatory and commercial context

Health Canada’s authorisation of CAN-PRIME in 2024 was, per public regulatory materials, the first authorisation of a Neuralink clinical trial outside the United States. The Canadian regulatory path did not require Neuralink to secure any particular new device classification; the N1 was reviewed under Health Canada’s existing pathway for investigational medical devices. The Canadian trial approval preceded both the UK and UAE approvals, though the actual first international surgeries took place in Canada in late August and early September 2025.

The commercial signal from Marten’s procedure is the combination of the transdural surgical change and the first ALS indication in Canada, in a single patient. Both are individually meaningful; together they establish that Neuralink can add both a new indication and a new surgical technique to the same trial site without needing to wait for one to be de-risked before the other proceeds. For Neuralink’s operational cadence, that is a meaningful signal.

What to watch

The first signal is whether the transdural technique gets applied to Marten’s subsequent CAN-PRIME participants and to new participants in the US, UK, and UAE trial arms. If the transdural approach becomes the default across all trial sites, Neuralink will have shifted its entire surgical protocol within one year of introducing it. If the durectomy technique remains in parallel use, the transdural approach is a specialist option for particular anatomies rather than a default.

The second signal is Marten’s own clinical outcomes over the coming months. Neuralink’s existing US and UK participants have publicly reported cursor-control, gaming, and text-entry outcomes across time horizons of one to two years. Marten’s outcomes at three months, six months, and twelve months will be tracked closely by both the trial site and by observers.

The third signal is whether Health Canada uses the CAN-PRIME data to authorise adjacent BCI trials in the country. Synchron, Paradromics, Precision Neuroscience, and other implantable BCI companies have not publicly disclosed Canadian trial arms. Whether Canada becomes a multi-BCI-trial jurisdiction or remains a single-Neuralink-trial jurisdiction is a policy signal for the country’s regulatory ecosystem.

The fourth signal is whether the Vancouver Police Department, or law-enforcement bodies elsewhere, adopt any formal position on BCI implants for officers with acquired disability. Marten’s status as a sergeant on medical leave puts the employer-employee dimension of BCI-enabled return-to-duty questions into public view for what may be the first time. The specific legal and administrative questions around a BCI-implanted officer resuming any active or administrative role are not yet answered anywhere.

Sources

• First Canadian ALS patient receives Neuralink brain-computer implant (MobiHealthNews, byline Jessica Hagen Executive Editor, 2 July 2026 4:28pm)
• Vancouver ‘RoboCop’ is one of 1st Canadian ALS patients to receive Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant (CBC News, byline Lyndsay Duncombe, 2 July 2026)
• Vancouver Police sergeant becomes first Canadian ALS patient to receive Neuralink brain implant (BetaKit, ~3 July 2026)
• Vancouver ‘RoboCop’ is 1st Canadian ALS patient to receive Neuralink brain implant (Radio-Canada English service, 2 July 2026)
• UHN surgeons perform Canada’s first Neuralink implant surgeries (Hospital News, prior coverage from September 2025 baseline)
• University Health Network press release (UHN performs first Neuralink implant surgeries outside the US)
• Neuralink PRIME parent study (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06429735)
• Neuralink GB-PRIME UK study (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07127172)
• Neuralink UAE-PRIME study (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06992596)
• UCLH (Seven GB-PRIME patients now participating in Neuralink trial)
• Inside BCI: Paradromics first Connexus BCI implant Michigan Connect-One, 17 June 2026 · Chalmers Valle cortical microstimulation review, 30 June 2026 · Gestala ultrasound BCI Angel+ round, 3 July 2026