8 articles
The State Council's biomedical-new-technologies regulation took effect 1 May 2026, letting Chinese hospitals charge for BCI commercially after a translation approval. Foreign-invested enterprises remain locked out.
Reuters reported on April 30 that Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard's chemistry department convicted in December 2021 under the US China Initiative, has been appointed director of i-BRAIN, a newly established BCI institute at the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation. The lab gives Lieber access to dedicated nanofabrication, advanced lithography, and primate research facilities at a scale unavailable to him at Harvard. The appointment lands the same week as Axoft's $55M Asian-led Series A — the capital and talent legs of the same bilateral BCI flow.
Cambridge, Massachusetts implantable BCI company Axoft closed a $55M oversubscribed Series A on April 29, led by Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand's strategic arm C.P. Group Innovation with Chinese co-investors Hillhouse and Gaorong, alongside US participants Alumni Ventures and Stanford. The same announcement disclosed Axoft's first acute intraoperative test of its Fleuron polymer probe in a Shanghai patient — the first publicly confirmed clinical use of a US BCI material in China, with more Chinese trials planned this year.
China's National Healthcare Security Administration has set government-guided prices of 6,000–6,600 yuan per invasive brain-computer interface implantation procedure, with Sichuan, Hubei and Zhejiang now attaching fee schedules at the provincial level — moving the country further ahead of the United States on the reimbursement layer that will decide whether BCIs scale as routine medicine.
NeuCyber Neurotech's rotating CEO concedes a significant technology gap with Musk's outfit, even as China pours state funding into catching up and expanding human trials to 50 patients.
In just nine months China has issued a national BCI blueprint, overtaken the United States in BCI patent filings, funnelled hundreds of millions into startups, and has just granted the world's first commercial implant approval.
The invasive-BCI startup has now raised over $160 million in a year, with Alibaba and Tencent both on the cap table and multicenter clinical trials planned for later this year.
Neuracle Medical Technology secures NMPA clearance, making its coin-sized cortical implant the first invasive BCI anywhere in the world authorised for routine clinical sale.
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