Tag: John-Donoghue

4 articles

Market Moves

Precision Neuroscience closes oversubscribed $250 million Series D co-led by Pershing Square and the Ackman Oxman Institute

New York-headquartered invasive brain-computer interface operator Precision Neuroscience closed a $250 million oversubscribed Series D on Thursday 24 September 2026. Three co-leads: Pershing Square (Bill Ackman's investment firm), the Ackman Oxman Institute (the philanthropic BCI-and-neurotechnology venture Bill Ackman and Neri Oxman announced in August 2026 after their daughter Lucy's brain hemorrhage), and an undisclosed leading life-sciences investment fund. Additional participation from Duquesne Family Office (Stanley Druckenmiller), B Capital, ARK Invest, Invus, Mubadala Capital, Mirae Asset Capital, Korea Investment Partners, Hitachi Ventures, JSL Health Capital, and others. Total capital raised since 2021 founding is now $430 million. Proceeds will expand the clinical programme, advance Layer 7 through the next stages of FDA review, and build the infrastructure required for commercialisation. Precision was founded in 2021 by Ben Rapoport (Neuralink founding-team scientist, left Neuralink in 2018, Mount Sinai neurosurgeon), Michael Mager (CEO), Demetrios Papageorgiou, and Mark Hettick. Layer 7 is a thin-film 4,096-electrode microelectrode array that conforms to the cortical surface, non-penetrating, safely removable. Layer 7 holds an FDA 510(k) clearance authorising commercial use for recording, monitoring, and stimulating on the cortical surface for implantation durations of up to thirty days (granted April 2025), and has been used across 100-plus patient procedures at 18 medical institutions including the University of Pennsylvania Perelman, University of Chicago Medicine, Mount Sinai, and WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. Precision runs a wholly-owned MEMS manufacturing facility in Texas and holds a Medtronic commercial partnership. BrainGate founder and 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering laureate John Donoghue joined as Scientific Advisor on 23 July 2026. The Series D closes two days after Chinese non-invasive BCI operator BCI-Sonics closed a HongShan and Yunqi Partners-led RMB 200 million Pre-A in Shanghai on 22 September, the same day Premier Li Qiang inspected brain-computer interface products in Shanghai. Two top-tier private-capital signals into invasive and non-invasive brain-computer interface operators, one on each side of the Pacific, inside a single week.

Sep 25

Industry News

ABILITY Neurotech opens Munich intraoperative BCI trial

Geneva-based ABILITY Neurotech has run a first-in-human intraoperative trial of its fully implantable brain-computer interface at TUM University Hospital in Munich, with up to five brain tumour surgery patients recorded over 20 to 30 minute sessions. A chronic ALS implant with UMC Utrecht and TU Graz is scheduled for Q4 2026. The device is an ECoG surface-electrode implant powered inductively through the scalp, using a laser-based optical link to move raw high-bandwidth neural data through intact skin, not an optical neural-sensing BCI.

Aug 22

Industry News

Precision Neuroscience appoints John Donoghue as scientific advisor

On Thursday 23 July 2026, New York-based Precision Neuroscience announced the appointment of John Donoghue - founding investigator of the BrainGate consortium at Brown, co-founder of Cyberkinetics, and inaugural director of the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva - as a scientific advisor to the company. Donoghue will advise Precision's scientific and engineering teams on device design, signal decoding, and clinical strategy. The appointment lands two days after Precision's non-paralysed cursor-control demonstration across its 15-plus academic-medical-centre clinical network, and at exactly the moment ABILITY Neurotech, the Wyss Center spin-out whose technology was conceived under Donoghue's own directorship, prepares to begin its own chronic first-in-human implantation in ALS patients.

Jul 25

Industry News

ABILITY Neurotech reaches first-in-human at TUM Munich

On Tuesday 21 July 2026, Geneva-based ABILITY Neurotech announced the first-in-human recording of its fully implantable, batteryless brain-computer interface at TUM University Hospital Rechts der Isar in Munich. The device is a 128-channel sub-scalp ECoG array with a laser-based transcutaneous optical data link streaming raw neural signals through the scalp at 50 megabits per second. The first cohort is up to five brain-tumour surgery patients recording 20 to 30 minutes of intraoperative data each. The company's separate chronic implantation trial in ALS patients at UMC Utrecht, cleared by Dutch regulators on 26 May 2026, has not yet performed a surgery.

Jul 24