imec

The second annual Neurotech Leaders Forum drew executives, investors, researchers and regulators from Europe and the United States to imec's campus in Leuven, Belgium, on June 23-24, 2026, for sessions on clinical translation, capital formation, regulatory strategy and emerging frontiers. Thomas Stieglitz of the University of Freiburg gave the Day 1 keynote, arguing for perseverance and functionalist design, and later sessions covered women's health, European BCI ventures and the region's capital and regulatory challenges. Companies showing new work included WISE SpA, with its Heron spinal cord stimulation lead, and Melora Medical, with a transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) device for dermatology.

A Neuron paper describes Neuropixels Ultra, which packs 6,144 switchable recording sites at 6-micrometer center-to-center spacing while reading 384 channels simultaneously. In mouse visual cortex recordings, neuronal yield increased by more than twofold. The study also improved subcellular signal detection and cell-type classification, but it did not report simultaneous recording from 10,000 neurons.