BEIJING, June 21 (Xinhua) -- More than five years into the paralysis of his lower body due to a road accident and having endured two and a half years of futile traditional treatment, Zhiping (pseudonym) could hardly believe he'd be walking again.
But he is walking now, one year after a multi-target combined surgery, by just imagining the movements in his head.
It was made possible by the world's first simultaneous implantation of the Beinao-1 intelligent brain-computer interface (BCI) system and a spatiotemporal spinal cord stimulation system.
Zhiping underwent the surgery at Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University in Beijing in May last year and stayed there to practice using motor imagery -- imagining lifting his legs -- to control a spinal cord stimulation device and a lower-limb exoskeleton.
Five months later, as the muscle strength in his waist and legs improved, Zhiping began to independently control the movement of both thighs, lift his lower legs, and walk with the aid of special braces and crutches. As of now, his condition has improved from a complete spinal cord injury to an incomplete spinal cord injury, according to the hospital.
Jointly developed by the Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CIBR) in Beijing and NeuCyber NeuroTech (Beijing), Co., Ltd, the semi-invasive Beinao-1 system features an implantable unit surgically placed inside the patient's head, with electrodes positioned on the outer surface of the dura mater without penetrating or damaging brain tissue.
"Don't be mistaken by its incredibly thin and soft design -- this electrode array can build a communication bridge between the brain and the outside world," said Zhang Lei, director of the Instrumentation Core at the CIBR and general manager of NeuCyber NeuroTech, as he displayed a chip-shaped device placed inside an artificial brain.
To date, nearly 30 human implantations of Beinao-1 have been completed. The longest implantation has remained in place for more than one year, with a cumulative safe operating time of 65,000 hours in human subjects. The system has demonstrated stable performance, helping patients with limb paralysis regain motor function, while enabling patients with aphasia to decode and output nearly 100 commonly used Chinese words.
"Zhiping's case challenged the long-held medical belief that functional deficits caused by chronic spinal cord injuries are irreversible," said Zhang.
Medicine innovators have also turned to brain-related products to restore body functions for patients with diseases such as epilepsy. The GA002 injection, an innovative drug developed by a team at the CIBR and translated by the gene therapy company GenAns Biotechnology Co., Ltd., is one of them.
Having just received approval to begin clinical trials in late May, the drug targets drug-resistant epilepsy by delivering an engineered inhibitory receptor to neurons within the epileptic focus in the brain.
It is the world's first gene therapy based on the principles of chemogenetics for this indication and is at the forefront internationally. "It shows that China is increasingly capable of developing original innovative drugs," said Yu Tao, deputy general manager of the company.
Moreover, leveraging optogenetics technology, the company has independently developed GA001, an injectable therapy that can effectively improve vision in patients blinded by retinitis pigmentosa. More than 10 patients have received the treatment to date, all of whom have achieved varying degrees of visual recovery.
The breakthroughs came against the backdrop of growing national efforts to build up the BCI sector and the innovative medicine industry.
The BCI sector was designated a future industry in this year's government work report. It was also included in the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) as the country aims to cultivate it into a new engine of growth.
More specifically, a guideline issued by seven authorities last August laid out short-term targets for the innovative development of the sector, including achieving key breakthroughs in BCI technologies with an advanced technology system, industrial system and standards system, by 2027, and significantly enhancing the innovation capacity of the industry with its overall strength ranking among the world's leaders by 2030.
In the meantime, biomedicine was designated a pillar industry for the first time in the government work report earlier this year, indicating a potential shift from a research hotspot to tangible public benefits for innovative drugs.
The growth has been palpable. According to an April think tank report forecasting the commercialization of the BCI sector, the total funding raised by Chinese BCI companies in the first quarter of 2026 had already surpassed the amount raised in all of 2025. It predicts that China's BCI market could exceed 5 billion yuan (about 734 million U.S. dollars) in 2026 and surpass 15 billion yuan by 2030.
In medicine, the total value of outbound licensing transactions involving Chinese innovative drugs in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded 60 billion U.S. dollars, nearly half of the full-year 2025 total, marking explosive growth across the industry.
Further development is advancing nonstop. Within this year, Beinao-1 is expected to complete enrollment for all of its registration clinical trials and will apply for medical device registration next year, whereas Beinao-2, a high-performance invasive BCI system based on a different technological approach, has entered the large-animal testing stage and is scheduled to begin clinical validation by the end of this year.
Also developing its own invasive BCI system, the Beijing-based medical technology company BCIFlex unveiled a 1,000-channel BCI system in March, with a key innovation: stretchable, flexible electrodes that address the problem of electrode threads being pulled out due to relative movement between brain tissue and the skull.
Drawing inspiration from traditional Chinese paper-cutting art, the company converted tensile loads on the electrodes into bending and deformation, thereby minimizing relative motion between the electrodes and brain tissue, reducing implantation-related damage, and enabling high-quality, long-term stable acquisition of neuronal signals at the single-cell level, according to Muyesser Sulayman, marketing manager of BCIFlex.
Noting that the product has just entered Good Clinical Practice (GCP) clinical trials, she added that the company plans to apply the product in the future to patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to help them replace or restore lost motor functions.
For Yu Tao and GenAns Biotech, their future endeavors could extend to tackling depression, which he described as a lack of response to normal reward stimuli. For example, drinking iced Coca-Cola on a hot day would normally bring pleasure, but patients with depression remain indifferent to such events, as their corresponding brain regions that should have been activated are not activated.
"The approach is to regulate key nodes or brain regions related to emotion, achieving activation where activation is needed and inhibition where inhibition is required," Yu said, revealing that relevant drug formulation may be completed within a year or two. ■
