Tag: news

10 articles

Industry News

Cleveland startup Neuronoff implants its first patient in a US Department of Defense-funded trial of a needle-delivered nerve electrode for bladder control after spinal cord injury

Neuronoff announced on 5 June 2026 that it has implanted the first patient in a US Department of Defense-funded clinical trial of its Injectrode, a helical platinum-iridium peripheral nerve electrode delivered through a single 18-gauge needle under local anaesthesia, in patients with neurogenic bladder dysfunction following spinal cord injury. The trial (NCT07264868) is being run at UT Health Houston under principal investigator Dr Argyrios Stampas, Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at McGovern Medical School. It is a Phase 1/2 randomised controlled study enrolling 21 participants across three arms (unilateral active stimulation, bilateral active stimulation, sham), with primary endpoints at 4 and 8 weeks assessing safety, stimulation accuracy, procedural feasibility, and physician and patient acceptability. This is the first-in-human spinal cord injury trial of the Injectrode.

Jun 6

Industry News

France's CEA-Leti opens new clinical trial taking its brain implant from paralysis recovery into post-stroke rehabilitation

France's CEA-Leti announced on 3 June 2026 that it has applied for regulatory authorization to begin BCI4Stroke, a brain-computer interface clinical trial extending the WIMAGINE epidural implant platform into post-stroke rehabilitation. The trial is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT07477613. WIMAGINE is the same platform that produced the 2019 tetraplegic exoskeleton walking demonstration (Benabid et al., Lancet Neurology) and the 2023 brain-spine interface paralysed-man-walks result with Gert-Jan Oskam (Lorach et al., Nature, the Courtine and Bloch programme). BrainSync is funded under France's €40 million Audace! research programme (France 2030) and the European Innovation Council under Horizon Europe.

Jun 3

Industry News

Irish patient with motor neurone disease uses his Neuralink brain implant to steer his wheelchair with thoughts alone

Eoin Egan, a 43-year-old Roscommon-born architect and property consultant living in London with motor neurone disease, has gone public as one of seven UK participants in Neuralink's GB-PRIME early feasibility study. Egan received his N1 Implant in December 2025 at UCLH's National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (Queen Square) in a six-hour robot-performed operation. Four days post-surgery he was driving his wheelchair through a London park with his thoughts alone, using bespoke software built by German assistive technology firm Homebrace that links the BCI cursor to wheelchair steering. He is the third UK GB-PRIME participant to surface publicly, after Paul (October 2025, also MND) and Sebastian Gomez (medical student paralysed in a diving accident).

May 31

Industry News

Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine join BrainGate, becoming the consortium's first Texas site and sixth team overall

Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine announced on 28 May 2026 that they have joined the BrainGate research consortium, the multi-institutional clinical brain-computer interface network founded by John Donoghue at Brown University. The Texas team is the sixth in the consortium and the first based outside the eastern and western US clusters. The Rice-Baylor work focuses on decoding cortical neural signals to operate assistive robotic devices that help people with tetraplegia eat and drink independently. The expansion lands the same week Donoghue was named a 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering co-laureate for his BrainGate-anchored work.

May 29

Industry News

NeuroXess says its Mandarin-decoding brain implant runs at 300 characters a minute, faster than native speech

Shanghai-based NeuroXess says a 35-year-old woman with epilepsy fitted with its 256-channel surface-cortex implant has been decoded reading Mandarin at 300 characters per minute through a large language model layer, faster than the roughly 220 cpm rate of a native Mandarin first-language speaker. Co-founder and chief scientist Tiger Tao disclosed the figure to Nature on 19 May 2026. The underlying paper has not yet been published, but the result sits on top of NeuroXess's already peer-reviewed Science Advances paper from 5 November 2025 (71.2% accuracy across 394 Mandarin syllables in a 43-year-old woman with epilepsy).

May 28

Industry News

Swiss BCI startup ABILITY Neurotech wins Dutch regulatory approval to begin first chronic implantation of its fully implantable wireless BCI in ALS patients

ABILITY Neurotech, the Geneva-based Wyss Center spinout building Europe's first fully implantable wireless optical-link ECoG brain-computer interface, received Investigational Medical Device Dossier (IMDD) approval from MREC NedMec in the Netherlands on 26 May 2026 to begin the first chronic implantation study of its device in ALS patients at UMC Utrecht under the INTRECOM consortium.

May 27

Industry News

Belgian ReVision Implant closes €4M oversubscribed seed for cortical vision prosthesis, with first-in-human trial cleared for Q3 2026

Belgian neurotech ReVision Implant closed an oversubscribed €4 million seed round in May 2026 to bring manufacturing of its Occular cortical vision prosthesis in-house ahead of a first-in-human trial cleared for Q3 2026 (October surgical-window cohort), with broader early-stage trials in blind volunteers expected in summer 2027. The round follows FDA Breakthrough Device Designation granted in March 2026.

May 27

Industry News

Neuralink's surgical robot can now reach any region of the human brain, opening Parkinson's, epilepsy and depression as new target indications

Neuralink disclosed on 7 May 2026 that its next-generation R1 surgical robot can place electrode threads into virtually any region of the human brain, threading through the dura mater with real-time motion compensation and a suite of eight optical coherence tomography cameras. The scope expansion opens Parkinson's disease, refractory epilepsy, and treatment-resistant depression as new target indications beyond motor-function restoration.

May 22

Industry News

Swiss BCI startup Neurosoft closes $7.5M seed led by Skybound, the first cheque from a new EIF-anchored European deeptech fund

Neurosoft Bioelectronics closed a $7.5 million oversubscribed seed round on 20 May 2026, led by Skybound Venture Capital and joined by PL Capital, IAG Capital Partners, and Connecticut Innovations. The round brings Neurosoft's total funding past $20 million and is the inaugural investment from Skybound, a new Athens-based deeptech fund publicly launched the same week with a $38 million first close anchored by the European Investment Fund.

May 22