How Coherence Neuro Is Developing a BCI to Fight Brain Tumors

Over the past decades, oncology has made remarkable strides. For many cancers, survival has improved so much that patients are more likely to live with the disease than die from it. Yet for the most aggressive brain cancers, progress has barely moved the needle. At a cancer support group, neural engineer Ben Woodington was reminded of this stark reality by a grieving mother: “My son, who died from a glioblastoma 30 years ago, was offered the exact same options you’re offered today.”

That grim status quo may soon change. Together with Elise Jenkins, Woodington founded Coherence Neuro, a startup developing a brain-computer interface that monitors and attacks brain tumors from within. Not with chemotherapy or radiation, but by speaking the brain’s own language: electricity. Their approach places an implant during tumor resection surgery, delivering targeted electrical signals to disrupt any remaining cancer cells. Electro-oncology, the proposed fourth pillar of oncology, may finally bring hope to patients who have had none.

When Neurotech Meets Oncology

Pioneering the ‘fourth pillar’ of cancer treatment is no easy path. For Ben, though, that path feels almost inevitable. In his own family, he witnessed the devastating impact of cancer firsthand. Spending time with loved ones facing the disease, he found himself asking why anyone would work on anything other than improving the lives of cancer patients. He half-jokingly says, “With so many problems in the world, why would you be working for a SaaS company?”

Ben’s career started in medical devices, spanning drug discovery, drug delivery, and patient compliance. When his employer was acquired, he found himself at a crossroads and chose to pivot into academia. He enrolled in Cambridge’s neurotechnology master’s program and later continued with a PhD on spinal-computer interfaces.

At Cambridge, Ben met his future co-founder, Elise Jenkins. Trained as an electrical engineer, she had previously designed sensors for Formula One cars before pivoting into neuro-oncology. In her new lab, she investigated how cancer cells fire electrically like neurons and establish junctions with them. She began exploring tools that could measure that electrical activity, predicting how a tumor will grow and inhibiting its proliferation through targeted stimulation.

Coherence CEO and Co-founder Ben Woodington.

“She introduced me to this field, and I thought, ‘This is crazy. How are more people not talking about it?'” Ben recalls. The two began collaborating, combining their expertise into synergies. “We co-published papers, me on device fabrication, her on the science and biology.” Ben’s experience building spinal cord interface devices proved directly transferable. “These exact same stimulation and recording protocols could be pointed at cancer,” he says. “It seemed too important an opportunity to ignore; certainly the biggest I’ve seen in neurotechnology.”

By 2022, their collaboration evolved into the founding of Coherence Neuro. While their idea was new, the field of cancer neuroscience is not. The research had been developing for about a decade, led by pioneers like Stanford’s Michelle Monje, who recently won the Brain Prize for her work on neuron-cancer cell interactions and how to disrupt their junctions. Ben and Elise decided to collaborate with Monje’s lab at Stanford, as well as with Erica Sloan’s lab at Monash.

Still, most of the early research in cancer neuroscience focused on traditional ways of disrupting junctions, like using nerve blocks and chemical neuromodulators. Ben and Elise spotted that gap. “You had researchers explaining how these cells are electrically active and form junctions with neurons, but most had never even heard of Synchron or Precision Neuroscience,” he says. “We came along and said: ‘We build these tools. We can install electrodes in your mice to treat tumors and monitor them electrically.’ fo the cancer neuro field, this is game changing.”

SOMA-1: The Implant Fighting Tumors From Within

Over the past three years, Coherence Neuro has developed the SOMA-1 device: a sapphire-encased implant capable of both recording and modulating brain activity. Its underlying technology is reminiscent of Neuralink, with thin-film electrodes on the front end and the compute, power, and coil contained in a hermetically sealed back end. And, like Neuralink, the device is strikingly elegant in design, despite the fact it will be implanted directly alongside malignant brain tumors.

The Coherence team is initially targeting brain cancers such as glioblastomas, low-grade gliomas, and astrocytomas, with plans to later expand into peripheral tumors. “We recently ran a study on pancreatic cancer, using electrical stimulation, and showed we could reduce tumor size with a small implant,” Ben says. “We’re also seeing the cancer neuroscience effect emerge in lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, prostate cancer, and skin cancers.”

Implanting a device deep in the brain and modulating electrical circuits directly is an invasive approach. For that reason, Coherence’s early years have focused on safety testing. So far, all work has been preclinical: studies tracking neuron-glioma interactions and testing electrical stimulation as therapy. The first cohort of human patients is planned for the end of this year.

Coherence Neuro envisions a treatment pathway where the SOMA-1 is implanted during existing surgeries. Currently, the device is designed to be placed during tumor resection, but the long-term aim is to insert it during an initial biopsy. This could create a closed-loop system in which tumors are continuously monitored and treated as and when they develop.

“The ultimate aim is that patients won’t need an MRI every few months,” Ben explains. “We want to monitor in real time, all the time, building new foundational models of biology and disease. That’s powerful in aggressive tumors, but perhaps even more exciting in very slow-growing tumors and other neurological disorders, where you can ‘wait and see’ while still tracking progression; this is how we will get to true, real-time precision medicine.”

Such real-time monitoring could be transformative for clinicians and oncologists, who currently have little real-time insights into their patients’ disease. And while today, curing aggressive tumors like glioblastomas remains out of reach, Ben is setting bold targets. “Our first goal is to double overall survival in these patients,” he says. “Extending median survival from 14 months to several years, and lifting five-year survival from 3–5% up to 50% - eventually, using closed loop systems, we will nudge these diseases into chronically managed conditions that a patient will be able to live alongside for decades.”

Electricity as the Fourth Pillar of Cancer Treatment

What makes Coherence’s electrical approach to oncology exciting is its apparent simplicity. “You can do it all electrically,” Ben explains. “We’re not measuring any chemical element of the tissue. We’re just asking: at what rate are neurons firing?” So far, Coherence has identified three main pathways through which these insights can be turned into treatment.

The first is to directly modulate cancer cells. Because cell division and depolarization are fundamentally electrical processes, electrical modulation can inhibit how tumor cells divide and proliferate. The second method targets the tumor microenvironment, modulating how neurons innervate cancer cells, how blood vessels fuel tumors, and how biochemical signaling unfolds. “Activating neurons can release neuromodulators that cause tumors to grow,” Ben notes. “So, we can target and disrupt that.”

The third mechanism focuses on immunomodulation. Electrical stimulation can up- or down-regulate local immune responses, making ‘cold’ tumors more responsive, or ‘hot’, to immunotherapies. Coherence is currently exploring multiple cancer types and body sites to identify where these pathways can be most effectively modulated. Once in surgical use, the SOMA-1 will not operate in isolation but complement surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

The SOMA-1 Implant.

The Future of Coherence's Neuro-Oncology

Coherence is in early-to-late preclinical stages across three cancer types: high-grade glioma, low-grade glioma, and pancreatic cancer. While the road to approval is long, Ben expects the first long-term human SOMA-1 implants by late 2027. The severity of these diseases, he argues, creates enough room to accelerate adoption. “The risk floor is kind of already there if you’re having surgery, and this gives us the agency to rapidly accelerate the adoption of new technology,” Ben explains.

From a business perspective, this expedited path to adoption positions neurotech in oncology as potentially the next big industry trend. “I think the application of neurotech in oncology is a sleeping giant,” Ben says. “In about 24 months, I think people will realize holy shit, the cancer therapeutics market is $500 billion per year. Just how many of those patients could you reach with a neurotechnology platform?”

For Ben, this shift won’t just mean more startups like Coherence Neuro, but a broader repositioning of the neurotech industry. Neuromodulation companies, he predicts, will add sensing capabilities and move into neurodiagnostics, while BCI companies may find their consumer markets smaller than expected and pivot into therapeutic trials.

In that sense, the ‘fourth pillar’ of cancer treatment could become one of the most significant applications of BCI technology. Perhaps it is less glamorous than extending human longevity or ‘supercharging consciousness,’ but Ben is unfazed. “It’s challenging at times. It’s a hell of a lot more fun trying to build a rocket company than working in cancer treatment, right?” he jokes. “But then I think: we want to talk about how to live to 110 while there are so many people dying at 40, including our friends and family. That’s illogical. That’s how we stay motivated.”

About the Founder

Ben Woodington, PhD, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Coherence Neuro. He earned his doctorate at Cambridge, where he researched bioelectronic medicine and building minimally invasive spinal-computer interfaces. After earlier work in medical devices and drug delivery, he shifted his focus toward neuro-oncology, combining his research expertise with a drive to bring new options to cancer patients. In 2022, he co-founded Coherence with Elise Jenkins to pioneer electro-oncology as a new frontier in cancer care.

About the Firm

Founded in Cambridge in 2022 by Ben Woodington and Elise Jenkins, Coherence Neuro is developing SOMA-1, a tiny implantable brain-computer interface designed to monitor and modulate tumor activity in real time. By applying electricity as a therapeutic tool, the company aims to establish electro-oncology as the ‘fourth pillar’ of cancer treatment and expand the utility of BCI. Coherence is advancing preclinical programs in glioma, brain metastasis, and pancreatic cancer, with human trials expected in the coming years.