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News

Science Corporation names Darius Shahida President as PRIMA retinal implant enters commercial rollout

Science Corporation, Max Hodak's Alameda-headquartered neural engineering and brain-computer interface company, announced on 17 September 2026 that Chief Strategy Officer Darius Shahida has been appointed President in a dual role. Shahida joined full-time in January 2026 as CSO after eight years at Butterfly Network and after first participating in Science's Series B as an investor. He is the second senior Butterfly Network alumnus hired by Science this year; Nevada Sanchez, a Butterfly Network co-founder, joined as EVP Engineering on 29 July 2026. The Shahida appointment lands two months into the European commercial rollout of PRIMA, Science's photovoltaic subretinal implant for geographic atrophy in age-related macular degeneration, which received CE mark from DEKRA in July 2026 (30 European countries; commercial launch also covers the UK) and simultaneous FDA Breakthrough Device and Humanitarian Use Device designations. Science closed a $230 million Series C on 5 March 2026 from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, IQT, Quiet Capital and others, bringing total capital raised to roughly $490 million since founding in 2021. Hodak remains CEO. The company operates from Alameda with offices in Paris and Research Triangle Park.

Sep 19, 2026 · 5 min read

Industry News

Arbor Neuroscience CEO Philip Sabes tells Shanghai BCI symposium that prediction is the neuromodulation bottleneck

Philip Sabes, a Neuralink co-founder (full-time 2017 to 2020) and now CEO of Arbor Neuroscience, delivered a keynote at the BCI Inno+ Salon International Symposium on Brain-Computer Interface in Shanghai on 14 September 2026. His stated thesis was that the real bottleneck in neuromodulation is prediction: because clinicians cannot reliably predict what will happen after brain stimulation, treatment outcomes are inconsistent. Sabes summarised current practice as 'poke and hope' and positioned Arbor's approach as 'predict and treat'. Arbor Neuroscience is the September 2026 rebrand of Forest Neurotech, a functional-ultrasound-imaging Focused Research Organization founded by Sumner Norman, Tyson Aflalo and Will Biederman inside Convergent Research. The symposium was hosted by the BCI Innovation and Transformation Center at Brain Intelligence World in Shanghai's Minhang District, a Shanghai state-backed partnership between Minhang District, Lingang Group, Shanghai State Investment Corp and Huashan Hospital (a Fudan University teaching hospital), positioned as China's first BCI industry cluster. Sabes made no public statement on US and China BCI competition, export controls, or the recent NSCEB and BIS enforcement actions.

Sep 19 · 4 min read

Research

UCSF brain-computer interface decodes speech and body gestures simultaneously from a single cortical implant

A Nature Neuroscience paper published on 14 September 2026 by Samantha C. Brosler, Jessie R. Liu, Alexander B. Silva and senior author Edward F. Chang at UCSF reports the first single-implant, single-session, real-time simultaneous decoding of speech and upper-body gestures in people with paralysis. Two of three BRAVO-trial participants (Bravo-1r, brainstem stroke, seven years enrolled; Bravo-6, ALS, implanted March 2025) controlled a personalized virtual avatar with parallel speech and gesture decoders reading from a 253-channel high-density ECoG surface array manufactured by PMT Corporation. Bravo-1r reached median 100 percent accuracy on both decoders in the real-time conversation paradigm; Bravo-6 reached 85 percent gesture and 75 percent speech. The design finding is that multimodal neural signals are not the linear sum of isolated speech and gesture signals: decoders trained on simultaneous data outperform decoders trained on isolated data, and cross-training drops opposite-modality false-positive rates from 76 percent (Bravo-1r) and 31 percent (Bravo-6) to zero. Chang has stated a fully implantable wireless successor is the next step. Hardware footprint is PMT surface ECoG plus a Blackrock Neurotech digital headstage per prior Chang-lab methods, with no overlap with Neuralink Threads, Paradromics Connexus, or Synchron Stentrode. This is the fourth UCSF Chang-lab BRAVO paper in the peer-reviewed communication-BCI sequence: Moses NEJM 2021, Metzger Nature 2023, Littlejohn Nature Neuroscience 2025, Brosler Nature Neuroscience 2026.

Sep 18 · 6 min read

Policy & Regulation

China issues a medical-device standard for AI processing of EEG data in brain-computer interfaces

China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has issued what state news agency Xinhua characterises as the world's first medical-device standard covering AI-processed electroencephalogram (EEG) data in brain-computer interfaces, announced on 14 September 2026. The standard was drafted by the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control (NIFDC) under an expedited procedure and becomes effective on 1 September 2027. Scope: quality requirements and evaluation methods for EEG datasets used by AI algorithms in BCI medical devices, covering collection, processing, annotation, storage, and access across R&D, production, and quality-control stages. Named NMPA and NIFDC officials: Yuan Peng (Deputy Director, NMPA Department of Medical Device Registration), Li Shu (Deputy Director, NIFDC medical device institute), Zheng Jia (Deputy Director, NIFDC Institute for Medical Device Standardization). This is the third BCI-related medical-device standard issued by China in twelve months, following 2025 standards on BCI terminology and on test methods for implantable closed-loop neural stimulators. The US FDA has no BCI-specific AI/EEG data-quality standard. The EU has no BCI-specific standard, only horizontal AI Act coverage of medical BCI as high-risk. On the narrow AI-EEG-BCI slice, China's world-first framing holds up.

Sep 17 · 8 min read

Industry News

Paradromics's first Connexus participant used a brain implant to speak her own words

Paradromics announced on 14 September 2026 that the first participant in its Connect-One Early Feasibility Study, a Michigan woman in her 60s with progressive motor neuron disease and severe dysarthria, has used the Connexus intracortical brain-computer interface to generate her own words, answer open-ended questions, and hold a live phone call with her grandchildren, three months after her June 2026 implant at University of Michigan Health. Verbatim first sentence: 'Okay, I have a lot to say.' Second sentence: 'Don't be afraid. It's a wonderful experience to be able to help others by your participation in the research study.' Both were decoded in real time, word for word, with no errors, according to Paradromics. Output modality is text plus synthesized speech (not avatar-mediated). Quantitative benchmarks (words per minute, word-error rate, vocabulary size, decoding latency) were not disclosed. The Connect-One EFS runs across three sites (University of Michigan Health, UC Davis Health, Mass General Brigham) under FDA IDE approval granted in November 2025. Same-day academic milestone at UCSF (Edward Chang team, Nature Neuroscience) demonstrates simultaneous speech and gesture decoding via animated avatar. The two results are categorically different (commercial vs academic, text-plus-audio vs avatar-mediated) and should not be conflated.

Sep 16 · 8 min read

Market Moves

Three Chinese BCI operators are in the IPO queue at once

Three Chinese brain-computer interface operators are simultaneously moving through IPO processes on two exchanges. Neuracle Medical Technology (博睿康技术（上海）股份有限公司) is the leader: its Shanghai STAR Market prospectus was accepted 11 June 2026 with a planned RMB 2.5 billion (~US$345M) raise. Neuracle received China's first commercial invasive BCI approval from NMPA in March 2026 (NEO-ONE SCI for spinal cord injury). BrainCo (强脑科技) filed a confidential Hong Kong Exchange application in January 2026 (joint sponsors CICC and UBS), with the September 2026 pricing calendar showing no imminent hearing. Arfysica Innovation (术理创新), led by female founder Wang Wei, registered STAR Market pre-IPO tutoring in early September 2026 with Huatai United Securities, entering the pipeline three months behind Neuracle at the earliest stage. Neuracle's disclosed prospectus reveals RMB 108 million 2025 revenue, all from non-invasive EEG systems, with the NEO invasive product still at zero commercial revenue and 32 patients implanted by end-2025.

Sep 14 · 10 min read

Policy & Regulation

Cambridge-led security team names five attack families that break AI-powered brain-computer interfaces

A team led by Zahra Tarkhani (Microsoft), Georgios Akkogiounoglou (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Lorena Qendro (Nokia Bell Labs), Isabel Tscherniak (TU Munich), and senior author Anil Madhavapeddy (University of Cambridge) published NERVE Attacks: Breaking AI-Powered Brain-Computer Interfaces on arXiv on 8 September 2026. The paper introduces a taxonomy of five attack families that together span the complete BCI signal chain: Neuro-mimetic Forgery, Evasion via Desynchronization, Replay-based Hijacking, Vein Tapping, and Embedded Backdoors. It releases EEGle, an AI-assisted extensible framework for systematic BCI security analysis, and reports 17 novel neuro-specific attack instances plus a stealth-effectiveness spectrum for BCI backdoor design. The submission lands four days after Germany's outgoing federal data protection commissioner used the BfDI's annual Bonn conference on 4 September 2026 to press for tighter European handling of neurodata, and one day after four senior clinician-scientists published a Comment in Nature Neuroscience setting out four ethical priorities for implantable BCI research. The empirical attack surface has now caught up with the governance framing.

Sep 13 · 6 min read

Policy & Regulation

Plexon settles $1.7M US export case for shipping brain-recording equipment to China's People's Liberation Army

The US Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced on 14 August 2026 an administrative enforcement settlement with Dallas, Texas neural-instrumentation maker Plexon, Inc. over eight unlicensed exports between 10 February 2022 and 30 August 2023 to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), the People's Liberation Army's biomedical research arm and a party on the BIS Entity List since December 2021. The shipments comprised eight OmniPlex Neural Recording Data Acquisition Systems and accessories, valued at approximately US$178,721. The civil penalty is US$1.7 million, suspended in full for five years contingent on Plexon completing an external export-compliance audit and committing no further violations. AMMS was added to the Entity List in part for supporting Chinese military end uses including 'purported brain-control weaponry.' The settlement is the first BIS enforcement action publicly involving commercial brain-computer interface research instrumentation, and lands eight years after BIS's November 2018 emerging-technology framework flagged BCI and AI for brain modeling as candidate export-control categories.

Sep 11 · 6 min read

Market Moves

ONWARD Medical crosses seven ARC-BCI implants as ARC-EX commercial revenue grows 240 percent in H1

Dutch-Swiss neurotech ONWARD Medical (Euronext ONWD) reported First Half 2026 results on 9 September 2026 with total revenue of EUR 4.2 million (up from EUR 1.2 million H1 2025), ARC-EX external spinal-stimulator commercial revenue up 240 percent to EUR 3.4 million, and cumulative ARC-BCI Therapy participants now at seven, with two additional implants completed in the half. ARC-BCI is ONWARD's flagship platform pairing the CEA/Clinatec WIMAGINE 64-electrode epidural cortical brain-computer interface (exclusive-licensed 15 October 2024) with the ARC-IM implantable spinal cord stimulator. ONWARD is accepted into the FDA Total Product Life Cycle Advisory Program for ARC-BCI. Cash position was EUR 81.5 million at 30 June 2026 following the April 2026 EUR 40.6 million equity raise led by EQT Life Sciences and a new BlackRock debt facility up to EUR 50 million. ARC-EX (FDA De Novo cleared December 2024) is now available in more than 130 US clinics and shipped 159 systems in the half.

Sep 10 · 6 min read