China’s future tech race with US set for a boost with new Fudan brain chip centre

A leading Chinese university has set up a research centre for brain-computer interface (BCI), a technology that gives humans the ability to control external devices such as computers or robotic limbs with their minds.

The 400mil yuan (RM249.48mil or US$56mil) facility at Fudan University comes as China continues to push the development of disruptive technology amid a race for tech supremacy with the United States, a long-time leader in BCI research.

Launched last Saturday, the university’s Neuromodulation and BCI Research Centre is expected to drive innovation for the technology’s revolutionary potential in the medical and healthcare industry – such as restoring a sense of sight for the blind and mobility for paralysed patients.

According to the centre’s deputy director, Shu Yousheng, industrialisation of innovative BCI has been held back by the lack of technical support from other disciplines.

The new research centre aimed to bridge the gap between brain disease research and industry, the public university in Shanghai said on its website.

The centre represented a systemic integration of Fudan’s brain science-related resources, and expected to power the clinical application and industrialisation of BCI, it said.

The Shanghai city government in December 2021 listed rehabilitation and training equipment with BCI technology as a focus for high-end medical equipment development under its latest five-year plan.

BCI is among the future industries being especially promoted by the central government as “new quality productive forces” – a concept for hi-tech, innovative development put forward by President Xi Jinping about a year back.

In January, an official guideline on the development of emerging and future industries released by Beijing emphasised the industrialisation of BCI technologies.

The country encourages “breakthroughs in key technologies and devices such as brain-computer fusion and brain-like chips, and exploration of applications in typical fields such as medical rehabilitation”, the document said.

The Beijing city government in April unveiled a road map for faster development of the BCI industry, aimed at breakthroughs in related core key technologies and incubating many leading companies by 2026.

A BCI laboratory was also set up in March 2023 in the northeastern port city of Tianjin near Beijing. In May this year, the lab established a BCI and Human-machine Fusion Association involving more than 40 financial institutions, research institutes and state companies, the Tianjin science and technology bureau said.

The United States has led the way on BCI technology for years, with significant research contributions from the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As China tries to close the gap, it has seen an explosion in research papers on the subject.

According to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Brain Informatics in December, the number of BCI publications in China from 2019 onwards exceeded that of the US, which started to decline during the period.

Neuralink Corp, a BCI pioneer co-founded in 2016 by Elon Musk, has successfully implanted a second paralysed patient with a device designed to enable the use of digital devices using only their thoughts, according to the billionaire businessman and start-up investor.

The procedure “seems to have gone extremely well”, Musk told a podcast hosted by computer scientist Lex Fridman and released last Friday.

The trial patient had a spinal cord injury similar to the first patient, who was paralysed in a diving accident, he said. That procedure had been carried out in January.

In February, scientists at China’s Tsinghua University reported “breakthrough progress” in their first patient for a wireless BCI implant, and said their device was less invasive than Musk’s Neuralink chip.

China is also racing to set up industry standards for the future technology – which involves key ethical concerns including privacy, safety and autonomy – and released a guideline in February to regulate the development and application of BCI research.

And last month, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology completed seeking public feedback on a plan to set up a committee to develop standards for the use of BCI technology, such as brain information acquisition, preprocessing, encoding and decoding, data communication and data visualisation. – South China Morning Post