Chinese start-ups and researchers are racing to bring brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to market that can be implanted in just a few minutes, as Beijing pushes to nurture home-grown players in the sector to compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink.
The Chinese devices - which enable patients to control digital technology using their thoughts alone - can be inserted via a vein like a stent, unlike conventional BCIs that require patients to undergo brain surgery.
StairMed Technology - one of the start-ups involved - "is developing a more minimally invasive way of delivering the device, entering through blood vessels in the neck and guiding it through the vascular system directly into the brain," said Zhao Zhengtuo, the company's co-founder, at the Global Health Summit in Hong Kong on Saturday.
The Shanghai-based firm has raised more than 1.1 billion yuan (US$163 million) in funding over the past year to push forward with its research, with investors including the Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
In December, StairMed unveiled the programme - undertaken in partnership with a research team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences - to insert BCIs via blood vessel into a targeted region of the brain and anchor them in place outside the vessel wall. So far, it has tested the technique on sheep, but has yet to begin human trials.
The BCI implant device market is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade, and be worth US$80 billion in the United States alone by 2035, according to a Morgan Stanley report. China has vowed to nurture "two or three" global players in the sector by 2030.
The core technology used by BCI pioneer Neuralink currently involves opening the skull to expose the brain and inserting a device into the cortex. Implanting the device via a vein would allow faster procedures and reduce the life-threatening risks inherent to invasive brain surgery, experts said.
Duan Wanru, chief physician at Xuanwu Hospital under Beijing's Capital Medical University, said the hospital was also exploring a vascular approach that involved placing the BCI device in the brain's venous sinuses. It has already started its first human clinical study.
"A surgeon with four or five years of experience can position the device in as little as 10 minutes," Duan said. "So far, there have been no major safety concerns, and the implant can even be removed and retrieved within a month of the operation."
China's Nankai University completed what it called the world's first human trial of a BCI implanted via blood vessels last year.
China is not alone in trying to develop vein-inserted BCIs. In 2023, a start-up named Synchron implanted BCIs on 10 patients via their jugular veins in Australia and the United States, tech media outlet IEEE Spectrum reported.
With the brain-computer interface implanted, paralysed patients - mostly quadriplegics who have lost all movement below the neck - "can now use their thoughts alone to approach a life close to that of able-bodied people", said StairMed's Zhao.
In one recent StairMed trial, a patient who had a BCI implanted via brain surgery could use the device to serve customers on the Chinese e-commerce platform JD.com, helping them earn a monthly income of about 1,800 yuan.
