Duan Wanru of Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing told SCMP that an experienced surgeon can position an endovascular brain-computer interface in as little as 10 minutes. Her verbatim quote: “A surgeon with four or five years of experience can position the device in as little as 10 minutes.” The claim refers to the vascular-delivery positioning step, comparable in scope to the deployment step in Synchron’s Stentrode procedure.
StairMed’s endovascular program
StairMed Technology co-founder Zhao Zhengtuo announced a separate endovascular research program at the Global Health Summit in Hong Kong on Saturday 8 August 2026. The program was unveiled in December 2025 in partnership with a Chinese Academy of Sciences research team. The device enters the brain through blood vessels in the neck and is anchored outside the vessel wall in a targeted brain region.
Testing to date is in sheep. No human implants. StairMed as a company has raised more than 1.1 billion yuan (US$163 million) over the past year across its research portfolio, with Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding among the named investors. Alibaba also owns SCMP, which the paper discloses in the article.
The endovascular program is separate from StairMed’s WRS02, a 256-channel wireless intracortical system already at 18 human implants at Huashan Hospital, covered in the 20 July piece. StairMed as a single company now operates in both the intracortical and endovascular tracks.
The Synchron benchmark
Synchron’s Stentrode is the Western endovascular BCI benchmark. Delivery is via jugular vein. Synchron’s US COMMAND trial has completed six patient implants, with reported deployment on the order of 20 minutes.
Duan’s 10 minutes is a best-case estimate for an experienced surgeon rather than a cohort median. If reproduced across a patient cohort at that pace, it would sit at roughly half Synchron’s reported deployment time. It is not comparable to Neuralink’s total surgical time, since Neuralink R1 is robot-assisted craniectomy with intracortical thread insertion rather than vascular deployment.
Nankai University’s June 2025 first-in-human
Nankai University announced on 22 June 2025 what it framed as the world’s first interventional human BCI implantation. The team is led by Duan Feng of Nankai University, a different person from Duan Wanru of Xuanwu Hospital.
The patient was a 67-year-old with left-side paralysis from cerebral infarction, who reportedly regained grasping capability after the procedure. The Nankai program had progressed through sheep testing in 2022 and non-human primate testing in 2023 before the June 2025 first-in-human. The design uses a stent electrode entered via neck vessels and anchored in the cranial vessel wall. Surgery was performed at Fujian Sanbo Funeng Brain Hospital in Fuzhou, in collaboration with Fujian Provincial Second People’s Hospital.
Where this sits in the Chinese BCI landscape
Chinese BCI operators now hold positions across the main invasiveness classes:
Non-invasive: BrainCo consumer devices; Gestalt Technology and BCI-Sonics on the ultrasound side.
Semi-invasive: Neuracle NEO, NMPA-approved 13 March 2026 with first commercial prescription written at Huashan on 13 July 2026; NeuroXess Triple-Full; NeuCyber Beinao No.1.
Fully invasive intracortical: StairMed WRS02 (256-channel wireless, 18 human implants); Active Technology’s Tianshu 1024-channel program (type inspection report obtained, clinical trials preparing to launch per our 5 August coverage).
Endovascular: Nankai University (Duan Feng team, first-in-human announced 22 June 2025 at Fujian Sanbo Funeng Brain Hospital); Xuanwu Hospital (Duan Wanru, source of the 10-minute positioning claim, no publicly detailed patient cohort to date); StairMed endovascular research program (sheep only, unveiled December 2025).
What to watch
Three near-term milestones matter.
First, whether Xuanwu publishes patient count, safety readout, and total procedure time for its human clinical study. The 10-minute positioning claim needs peer-reviewed or conference-abstract validation to move from surgeon estimate to defensible operator metric.
Second, whether StairMed’s endovascular research program transitions from sheep to non-human primate testing, and on what timeline. StairMed has compressed the intracortical program timeline (WRS02 to 18 human implants in roughly 16 months). Whether that pace holds for the endovascular arm is untested.
Third, whether Nankai’s June 2025 first-in-human has been followed by additional patients, and whether the program stays as a purely academic effort or spins out a commercial operator. Nankai holds the only Chinese endovascular program with publicly detailed patient outcomes to date, and its trajectory sets the earliest realistic commercial-invasive-endovascular timeline for the Chinese cohort.