Chinese startup says its brain implant takes just 10 minutes
StairMed has secured over 1.1 billion yuan ($163 million) in the last year from investors such as Tencent and Alibaba
Getting a brain implant has always meant opening the skull. A Shanghai-based startup says it has found a way around that, threading its device through a neck vein and into the brain in a procedure it claims takes just ten minutes.
StairMed Technology's approach avoids the surgical robot and skull-opening process that devices like Neuralink require. Instead, co-founder Zhao Zhengtuo said at the Global Health Summit in Hong Kong that the device enters through a vein in the neck and travels through the vascular system to reach the brain, anchoring itself just outside the vessel wall rather than inside brain tissue.
Duan Wanru, a doctor working in Xuanwu Hospital, stated that a moderately skilled surgeon would be able to implant the device in just ten minutes. This is compared to the two hours that Neuralink's robot took to open the skull and implant the electrodes when it conducted its first surgery on humans in 2024.
StairMed has secured over 1.1 billion yuan ($163 million) in the last year from investors such as Tencent and Alibaba. However, despite raising all that money, the vein-based device is still under testing in sheep and has yet to go through any human clinical trial, making the ten minutes an objective.
StairMed is not the only company that is trying to achieve vascular implantation. According to IEEE Spectrum, Synchron has implanted its Stentrode in ten people in the US and Australia since 2023.
Whereas Synchron's technology remains within the blood vessel near the motor cortex and receives brain signals through the walls of the blood vessel, StairMed's device is designed to be deployed outside of the blood vessel.
The need for a ten-minute pitch by StairMed stems from commercial reasons. According to Morgan Stanley, the market for brain-computer interface implants might be worth $80 billion in the US by 2035. Furthermore, Beijing plans on having two to three companies from China to compete in the BCI space by 2030.
Thus, the shorter a procedure can take, the more likely it is that the hospital will integrate it into their workflow. *
