July 2025 issue
July 31, 2025 | Neural engineers, clinicians, and neuroscientists assembled in Arlington, VA last month for the 2025 Neural Interfaces Conference. The three-day event is the outgrowth of the NIH Neural Prosthesis Workshop, which began as an annual gathering of researchers funded by the NIH Neural Prosthesis Program. This year’s conference was produced by the North American Neuromodulation Society. The sessions offered a look back at key events from the conference’s history as well as a look forward toward new developments in the field.
The conference opened with a session called “Voices of Experience: Patients in Neurotech Trials. Jon Nelson, a participant of Motif Neurotech, described his experiences with treatment-resistant depression and the new life that neuromodulation offered him. Jennifer French, executive director of Neurotech Network, shared her experiences as an early user of implanted functional electrical stimulation systems.
Conference director Parag Patil from the University of Michigan moderated a session titled “Bench to Bedside Adventures and Misadventures: The Entrepreneur’s Journey.” Panelists included Chad Andresen from LunOSA, Maria Bennett from SPR Therapeutics, Phil Troyk from IIT, and Michael Onuscheck from Presidio Medical. Patil mentioned several “wicked challenges” neurotech entrepreneurs need to address. These include the valley of death in funding, the lack of reliable, replaceable hi-res neural interfaces, and the fact that neural mechanisms of action are poorly understood.
NBR editor James Cavuoto gave a talk on the history of neural interfaces, in which he highlighted several memorable moments from previous Neural Interfaces Conferences and Neural Prosthesis Workshops. Neurotech Reports offered attendees a compendium of its coverage of the conference beginning in 2001, when the publication was launched.
The session “Open-Source Neuromodulation: Driving Innovation & Accessibility” featured Yves Nazon from the Open Source Hardware Association, Kevin Kilgore from MetroHealth System, Victor Pikov from Medipace Inc, and Cynthia Chestek from the University of Michigan. Nazon provided an illustrative example of open-source innovation: Medtronic’s decision in March 2020 to release a permissive license for the hardware and software design of one of their ventilators. This enabled rapid global production to help doctors and patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. The talks by Kilgore, Pikov, and Chestek focused on two open-source implantable neuromodulation devices, both funded through the NIH HORNET program. Hardware and software for these devices are released on GitHub with a permissive license that specifically tailored for startups. The license places no restrictions for commercialization and allows patenting of further proprietary developments of the device and its algorithms, its clinical uses, novel leads, and novel surgical deployment methods.
The session “Biomarkers in Action: Advancing Adaptive Brain Stimulation” featured Simon Little and Ritwik Vatsyayan from UCSF, Svjetlana Miocinovic from Emory University, and Nicole Provenza from Baylor College of Medicine. Their presentations addressed closing the loop in DBS with cortical signals. The panelists highlighted four key themes: incorporating multiple brain signatures rather than a single one; along with brain signals, registering contextual biomarkers of bodily activities, such as physical activity and sleep; increasing complexity of algorithms by moving beyond threshold-based and supervised algorithms toward deep machine learning and unsupervised algorithms; and creating comprehensive datasets of brain signals to address patient heterogeneity, which is particularly important for psychiatric diseases.
The final session of the meeting “Funding the Future of Neurotechnology” featured Nick Langhals and Emily Caporello from NINDS/NIH, Tracy Wheeler from the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, and John Propst from Nexus Neurotech Ventures. Langhals opened with a disheartening update on the recent layoff of more than 143 personnel at NINDS (as of May 2025), paused grant reviews, reduced funding announcements, and cancellations and freezes on recent awards (specifically affecting foreign teams). The Translational Neural Devices team at NINDS, led by Langhals, manages a portfolio of neuromodulation grants and was also severely impacted, losing four of its 11 members. Wheeler and Propst indicated their organizations remain unaffected by the turmoil in Washington. Both are supported by wealthy philanthropists—Craig H. Neilsen and Sergey Brin—who provide steadfast support of neural technologies for treating neurological and psychiatric disorders.
