Neural Noise

BCI clinical research award recognition

2 min read

  • A brain-computer interface clinical study won a top national clinical research award (UC Davis Health, April 2025).1
  • The award signals validation of clinical BCI and neuroprosthetics research.1 1

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

  • The recognition is The Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award, the most prestigious honor of the Clinical Research Forum, presented at the awards ceremony on April 14, 2025 in Washington, D.C., and it carries a $7,500 prize.2
  • The winning team is from UC Davis Health: neurosurgeon David Brandman (site-responsible principal investigator) and co-principal investigator/neuroscientist Sergey Stavisky, co-directors of the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab, with neurological-surgery postdoctoral scholar Nicholas Card as lead author.2
  • In February 2025 the same study was also selected for a 2025 Top Ten Clinical Research Achievement Award, honoring 10 outstanding clinical research studies published the prior year.2
  • The awarded work is a brain-computer interface speech neuroprosthesis published in the New England Journal of Medicine.23
  • The study participant was a 45-year-old man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), tetraparesis, and severe dysarthria (ALSFRS-R = 23), enrolled in the BrainGate2 pilot trial (NCT00912041).3
  • The device used four microelectrode arrays recording from 256 intracortical electrodes implanted in the left precentral gyrus, with surgery performed roughly 5 years after ALS onset and first device use 25 days after implantation.3
  • Reported accuracy reached 99.6% with a 50-word vocabulary on day 1, 90.2% with a 125,000-word vocabulary on day 2 after 1.4 additional hours of training, and a sustained ~97.5% over 8.4 months.3
  • The participant communicated in self-paced conversation at roughly 32 words per minute for more than 248 cumulative hours, with a ~2.5% word error rate compared with ~5% for smartphone dictation.3
  • The BrainGate2 multisite trial remained open, recruiting an estimated 27 adults with ALS and other paralyzing conditions across five U.S. sites, underscoring ongoing clinical translation of intracortical speech BCIs.4

Footnotes

  1. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMivAFBVV95cUxPQUFGMzNkZThGLXpmbmJrRF9LeVBOMFRidmJpTlFPTDZwVll0cVU0UkxsRXdORWxCcVY2TWM3MXJMU2xfaDJINzRlcGIxZDV1LXdWQmY0RzhURW5pVWk1MXV3ZlMtVUFfNVZXT3Q1cmVWQWd6QnZkTXY4bWZraV9zOEI3TnZoVTlZTTg2aXNoYUhabkV6b2dycnllWHIxSTUzMzl0ZjlYNjZxNkdSUG9MQ1RWc0ZqRXd1Nm8wVg?oc=5 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/brain-computer-interface-study-wins-a-national-clinical-research-award/2025/04 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2314132 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. https://alsnewstoday.com/news/brain-computer-interface-restore-speech-wins-research-award/ ↩

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