How will the field’s relationship to industry change over the next decade? Will a larger neurotechnology sector emerge?

“Neuroscientists and engineers in academia will pivot into industry and pharma settings, creating potentially exciting startups around neuro-based tools. But it’s a hustle. They’ll make money, but they will not do anything for humans. I have doubts.”
—Benjamin Deneen, professor and Dr. Russell J. and Marian K. Blattner Chair, Baylor College of Medicine

“I definitely think so; given the foundation and acceleration of startups, it seems inevitable that the future is neurotech. I think both industry and academia should work hand in hand to make the science and technology more rigorous while being accessible to users.”
—Uttara Khatri, doctoral candidate, University of Texas at Austin

My impression is that yes, there is increasing crosstalk—for instance, when it comes to brain-machine interfaces, where the expertise of systems neuroscientists is really necessary to make sense of the data that have been read out by these probes. Here in London, for instance, there’s a lot of crosstalk between academia or research institutes and clinics that are sometimes associated. So, in my experience, that seems to be happening a lot, but it might not be representative.”
—Johannes Kohl, group leader, Francis Crick Institute

“Neuroscience has always been an emerging last frontier sort of field. I would say it is behind the curve as far as technology being brought to the private sector, but I could see it becoming more and more prevalent.”
—Steven Proulx, group leader, University of Bern

“The relationship with industry is likely to grow significantly for all scientists. I’ve worked in industry for several years, and believe that strong scientific voices have a great impact on businesses (and vice versa). Scientists don’t need to be an industry in and of themselves; they need to be an integral part of industry structures with the power to maintain ethical and empirical practices. And a larger neurotechnology sector is already emerging—I’d argue that it is exploding right now.”
—Bethany Ranes, sensory scientist, U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Lab

“The relationship is going to become deeper. As they are doing things closer to being effective in human neuroscience, there will be industries of neurotechnology and pharmacology that will be more closely involved. It will be a productive interaction.”
—Michael Stryker, professor of physiology, University of California, San Francisco

“More PIs are open to collaborating with industry, as contingencies. If they do not have funds, they will throw in with industry or a company to continue to do their work. That may be part of the situation.”
—Luana Colloca, professor of pain and translational symptom science, University of Maryland School of Nursing

“Well, that is the big question, right? I mean, especially now in the United States. Will industry somehow step up in order to help academia to keep neuroscience going? I mean, traditionally, they’re not doing that. When you look at it by and large, industry is not funding neuroscience at a large scale. But now, of course, the risk is that a pipeline for innovation is drying up. That, in 10 or 20 years, will hit industry hard if neuroscience does not come up with new understanding for diseases, and how they can be addressed and targeted, for example. Or new innovative companies that will just drive innovation even outside of neuroscience. And of course, that’s difficult to imagine, because companies have a much shorter horizon for return on investment that science, I think, has a difficulty of fulfilling.”
—Jorg Grandl, associate professor of neurobiology, Duke University

“We academics provided most of the training for the scientists in that workforce, and if we are not able to train scientists, they’re gonna lose their workforce as well. So industry should really be also worried, and potentially trying to shore up the gaps here in training and give back to the community at a time where they probably really need it.”
—Jason Shepherd, professor of neurobiology, University of Utah

“In the ’40s and ’50s, before we had really scaled up federal funding for research a ton, it was companies like Bell Labs and others that went all in on research, right? They spent huge amounts of money by today’s standards on research with no obvious product implication, and people speak pretty warmly about what that did for science in the U.S. So maybe we’re just entering another era like that as we shrink down federal funding. I don’t know where those Bell Labs are. I shudder to think about Meta and Amazon being the funders of that, for various reasons, but maybe I wouldn’t have liked AT&T Bell very much back then either.”
—Joshua Dudman, senior group leader, Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

“Over the last 80-some years, we’ve been relying on basically one model of funding neuroscience or science: grants. … Now we’re seeing the consequences of when that model is threatened, happening in real time. This may be an opportunity to reevaluate how we’re doing science. Prior to the governmental grants, a lot of science was done as partnerships with industry or partnerships with other non-academic entities. It might be time to revisit that model and say can we start building collaborations with industry where the industry and the collaboration agrees that we’re going to be focused on a deliverable which is important for industry.”
—Randy McIntosh, director, the Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, Simon Fraser University

“It’s already changing in my reality, in computational neurobiology. A fraction are in industry. Computer scientists want to work at Google. … It will be increasingly porous, by necessity, with lots of anxious grad students right now. The future is uncertain, and we can’t assure them … They should look for options, develop skills, as skills are not just output of a paper. A Nature article can’t help you get a normal job. We need to recast things they already learned in terms of skills to be marketable in industry. I run a couple of career development workshops. CV workshops to turn that into a resume. We need to admit that that is where they will go and restructure training accordingly.”
—Bing Wen Brunton, professor of biology, University of Washington

“There’s also room for training programs to have more links to industry. I think for many years we’ve known that our Ph.D. programs are producing scientists who are mostly not going to stay in academia. And so lots of programs have changed the way that they view training in that regard.”
—Jason Shepherd, professor of neurobiology, University of Utah

“I am a little pessimistic on neurotech growing without a fundamental, predictable investment in basic science. We might get brief short-term gains, but without a robust community and support for trainees, this will not succeed.”
—Bryan W. Jones, professor of ophthalmology, University of Pittsburgh

“Unlikely since pharma disconnected with neuroscience and a viable brain-computer interface better than EEG does not yet exist.”
—Gerald Pao, assistant professor of data science, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

“I’ll answer that in a controversial manner. I don’t think there is much use for non-medical neurotechnology, and I’ll be generous and say, ‘yet.’ That’s because we do not understand the brain well enough to extract any utility in an industry approach. … We have to accept that right now, what we can do with our knowledge of neuroscience is amazing, but it’s mainly limited to the medical sector, which is fine and great and why does everything need to be commercially exploited? Why does everything need to generate profit? We have made phenomenal advances with neuroscientific basic science being applied in the clinic. Deep brain stimulation is the one that I always come back to. I work with patients with deep brain stimulation. That technique is magic, and it wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for neuroscientists.”
—Jan Wessel, Clement T. and Sylvia H. Hanson Family Chair and professor of psychological and brain sciences, University of Iowa

“I hear stories from people who have been in industry who say the things they observe are reckless. There are lots of things that go on that are not great science. So, this is a problem. I think that it is going to continue to be a problem … It is not like industry is the savior, that is for sure … As for the relationships with industry in general, I think there is a major problem: the time frame. Industry is never going to do what academics can do because of this problem with the time frame. If they do not turn a profit in three years, they are going to drop the project.”
—Anne West, professor of neurobiology, Duke University School of Medicine

“I’ve collaborated with people in research groups within industry, but not really on industrial applications. For example, DeepMind had an active neuroscience group that I interacted with a lot and I collaborated with. DeepMind pushed the idea of neuroscience-inspired AI, and that’s what I think drove some of the interest in neuroscience within industry. But that wasn’t really representative of the field as a whole, and I would say that by and large, that point of view has waned and hasn’t really paid dividends as well.”
—Samuel Gershman, professor of psychology, Harvard University