--- title: "A one-atom-thick film just met a human brain in surgery" date: 2026-10-28 category: Brain–Computer Interface site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-brain-inbrain-graphene-bci language: en --- # A one-atom-thick film just met a human brain in surgery > Spain's INBRAIN Neuroelectronics implanted the first graphene-based brain-computer interface in a person in 2024, betting on material science over metal electrodes. A sheet of carbon one atom thick is lowered onto a person's brain during cancer surgery. It is not there to treat the tumor. It is there to prove a material can listen to the brain without harming it. ## Key takeaways - INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a Barcelona spinout, performed the world's first implantation of a graphene-based brain-computer interface in a person in September 2024. - The implant is about 10 micrometers thick — thinner than a human hair — and is designed to both read and stimulate neural signals. - A $50 million Series B in October 2024 was led by imec.xpand with backing from European public funds; total raised reached $68 million. - The first-in-human study, run in Manchester, is evaluating safety during brain-tumor (glioma) resection, not yet the company's planned Parkinson's therapy. - Graphene's appeal is resolution without the stiffness of metal electrodes — potentially less damage to soft brain tissue. ## Why graphene, and why now Graphene is a form of carbon arranged in a single atomic layer. It won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 2010 and has spent years promising everything from better batteries to faster chips. INBRAIN's bet is narrower and more concrete: use graphene as the interface between electronics and brain tissue. Traditional implantable BCIs rely on metal electrodes (such as platinum-iridium arrays) or stiff penetrating wires. Both work, but both sit awkwardly against tissue that is soft, wet and constantly shifting. INBRAIN's electrode is a flexible film roughly ten micrometers thick. Thinness matters because an interface that yields with the brain, rather than pressing into it, is expected to reduce inflammation and the signal loss that comes with scarring. The company pairs the material with on-board computation that decodes neural activity and delivers stimulation in a closed loop — read the signal, decide what to do, act. ## The first human procedure In September 2024, surgeons at Salford Royal Hospital in Manchester, UK, used INBRAIN's graphene interface during the removal of a brain tumor. The study is sponsored by the University of Manchester and led by Professor Kostas Kostarelos and neurosurgeon David Coope, with up to ten participants planned. The immediate goal is not to treat a disease with the device but to confirm that graphene electrodes are safe and capture high-quality neural signals in a living human brain. That framing is deliberate. Before any company can sell a therapy, it must show its material behaves in people the way it behaved in the lab. A brain-tumor resection is a controlled, time-limited opportunity to place an experimental interface, record from it, and learn — without asking a healthy volunteer to undergo surgery for the sole purpose of testing. ## The money behind the material Later in 2024, INBRAIN closed a $50 million Series B financing round led by imec.xpand, the venture arm of the nanoelectronics research hub imec, with participation from the European Innovation Council Fund, Spain's CDTI-Innvierte and Fond ICO Next Tech, and Catalonia's Avançsa. Including earlier investment, the company says it has raised $68 million since founding. A separate collaboration with Merck KGaA supports clinical development in areas of mutual interest. The investor mix is itself a signal: this is one of the most publicly funded BCI programs in the world, anchored in European research institutes rather than purely venture capital. That changes the incentives. Public funders care about clinical translation and sovereign capability; they are willing to back long, uncertain hardware roadmaps that pure commercial investors might avoid. ## Where it is headed INBRAIN holds an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a graphene-based therapy in Parkinson's disease, and it talks about treating epilepsy and aiding stroke rehabilitation through adaptive stimulation. Those are the eventual targets. The 2024–2025 human work, however, is the foundation layer: prove the material is safe and the signal is clean, then build the therapeutic applications on top. ## Honest limitations The first-in-human data are early and small, drawn from a surgical setting rather than from the company's planned Parkinson's or epilepsy therapy. Safety results reported to date come from INBRAIN and its clinical partners, not yet from independent peer-reviewed publications. Graphene interfaces have strong theoretical advantages, but long-term biocompatibility and signal stability in chronic implants remain unproven. No graphene BCI is approved for therapeutic use, and the gap between a successful resection study and a marketed neuromodulation device is measured in years and further trials. ## What readers can do now - Investors and policymakers tracking BCI should watch materials science, not just software; thin-film and graphene interfaces are where the next hardware leap may come from. - Patients with Parkinson's or epilepsy should treat any "graphene cure" claim as experimental; credible updates will appear in clinical-trial registries and neurology journals, not in product ads. - According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), the shift from stiff metal arrays to ultra-thin films and novel materials like graphene marks a quiet but decisive turn in how implantable BCIs balance resolution against tissue damage. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-brain-inbrain-graphene-bci Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.