By James Cavuoto, editor
August 31, 2026 | The 2026 NYC Neuromodulation Conference, held July 30 through August 3 at The City College of New York, underscored how quickly neuromodulation is moving from a research-driven field into a broader neurotechnology marketplace. The event was organized by Neuromodec and Marom Bikson, co-director of the Neural Engineering Lab and professor at CCNY. The meeting’s scientific agenda covered a range of topics, including noninvasive brain stimulation, TMS personalization, deep brain stimulation, spinal cord stimulation, autonomic and immune neuromodulation, computational modeling, home-based treatment paradigms, and evoked-response biomarkers—an agenda that mirrors many of the technical and reimbursement questions now facing neurotechnology companies.
Notable speakers and workshop faculty included leading figures from academic centers and clinical programs, including Mark George from the Medical University of South Carolina; Prasad Shirvalkar from the University of California, San Francisco; Helen Mayberg from Mount Sinai; Warren Grill and Cameron McIntyre from Duke University; Nicholas Schiff from Weill Cornell, and Tim Denison from the University of Oxford. Their presence reflected the conference’s continued mix of translational neuroscience, clinical neuromodulation, engineering, and device-development perspectives.
Shirvalkar gave an update on his work identifying brain biomarkers for chronic pain. Noting that pain is a distributed network, incorporating somatosensory, affective, and cognitive components, he traced the ascending and descending pathways involved with pain perception. As opposed to DBS for Parkinson’s disease, in which beta band stimulation works across most patients, a potential DBS therapy for pain would require individual biomarker discovery, he said.
Schiff gave an update on central thalamic DBS for treating moderate to severe TBI. Schiff is one of the founders of a start-up firm called Re-Emerge DBS, which recently secured more than $30 million in venture financing. He described a mesocircuit model that highlights the role that the central thalamus plays in arousal regulation. The CENTURY-S clinical study seeks to establish the feasibility of targeting and activating central lateral thalamus fiber projections to frontal and striatal neuronal populations.
Chad Bouton from Neuvotion gave an update on the company’s neural bypass system for restoring upper limb function in individuals with tetraplegia. Bouton’s team combined patterned stimulation of S! in conjunction with spinal cord stimulation, a process called cortical mirroring.
Grill gave attendees an update on his team’s work on kilohertz-frequency nerve block. “I think about recording from the nervous system as being analogous to reading, while stimulation is analogous to writing. And today, I’m going to talk about blocking the nervous system, which would be analogous to erasing,” he said. Example clinical applications of nerve block include post-amputee pain, urinary incontinence, diabetes, heart failure, and obesity. Grill pointed out that the diameter of different nerve fibers plays a key role in the ability to block signal conduction.
In a captivating closing session, Denison, Mayberg, and Jacob Robinson from Motif Neurotech offered their views on the future of DBS and what it’s going to take to bring new brain interface technology to market. Denison spoke of the commercial adoption “flywheel,” in which momentum creates value, which in turn generates more momentum. He cautioned that DBS could be displaced by biotechnology advances in gene editing, cell replacement and regeneration, RNA therapeutics, and related fields that tackle disease at the root and not just the symptoms. But neurotech can play a supporting role, he said, by offering better measurement techniques for recording and mapping key brain circuits, closed-loop delivery of biologics, cell, or genes, and real-time monitoring of responses. Neuromodulation could also be paired with biologics in a combination therapy. “The future is not neuromodulation alone,” he concluded. “It’s intelligent integration across biology and technology.”
Mayberg offered her views on the future of DBS for depression. Eschewing the term “treatment resistant depression,” she pointed out that major depression occurs as a series of episodes. Repeated failed treatments, or treatments presented in the wrong order, take a toll on response rates. “Failure-based treatment sequencing disrespects biology,” she said. Biomarker development is also essential for translating biology to the clinic.
Robinson juxtaposed the market for cardiac devices with the market for implanted mental health devices. There are about 600 million people with cardiovascular disease worldwide, he said, with a dozen categories of reimbursed devices treating 1.4 million patients and generating $22 billion in revenue each year. By contrast, there are more than 1 billion people with a mental health disorder but no reimbursed implants for mental health and only about 1,000 patients per year producing under $25 million in revenue. “Almost everyone wants something badly enough, they would get a brain implant,” he said. Commercial devices must create enough value to overcome the perceived risk and burden to the patient, physician, hospital, and payer.
The meeting also featured an exhibitor and sponsorship program aimed at companies serving neuromodulation researchers, clinicians, and device developers. Sponsors included Soterix Medical, Brain Vision, Neurovalens , Ampa, Magnus Medical, Nexstim, Magstim, Flow Neuroscience, Spark Biomedical, LivaNova, Subsense, and Neurolief. Neurovalens received a new product award from the organizers.
For the neurotechnology industry, the conference reinforced several themes likely to shape the next wave of investment and product development. First, noninvasive stimulation is becoming more sophisticated, with targeting, personalization, accelerated protocols, and at-home use emerging as competitive differentiators. Second, invasive and implantable systems continue to benefit from advances in computational modeling, sensing, and closed-loop control. Third, the field is broadening beyond traditional neurological and psychiatric indications into autonomic, immune, pain, addiction, and performance-related applications. Finally, recognition of firms such as Neurovalens signals that product innovation is increasingly part of the same conversation as academic discovery.
