IIlustration: Midjourney
At the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering‘s 50th anniversary symposium Sept. 3, Ellis Meng delivered the keynote address for the biomedical devices and imaging session with news that is rare in academic medicine: a device her center has spent years building is almost ready for its first fully implanted animal study, and when it is, she plans to give it away.
The device is called OpenNerve. It is a wireless, modular implantable pulse generator for the nervous system, capable of recording neural signals and delivering stimulation, configurable as a closed-loop system that can record activity and respond to it automatically. Its clinical application is left entirely open — a lab could use it for epilepsy, chronic pain, movement disorders, or something not yet imagined. And once it is released, any researcher in the world will be free to use it, modify it, and build on it at no cost.
“We try to develop a completely open-source neurostimulation system from scratch,” said Meng, the Shelly and Ofer Nemirovsky Chair in Convergent Bioscience and professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Keck School of Medicine of USC. “That would be shared broadly.”
Why It Had to Be Built From Scratch
The reason a device like this did not already exist is the same reason Meng has spent more than 20 years building tools the medical device industry has never had much incentive to make: researchers need customizable tools that can address a wide range of questions. Medical devices are purpose-built to treat a very specific condition. Researchers who want to develop new therapies have largely been left to fend for themselves.
That gap did not go unnoticed. Experts rallied around the need for open-source and open-access resources so that the community could focus on research and innovation without entanglements with intellectual property. This gave rise to the National Institutes of Health’s Human Open Research Neural Engineering Technology (HORNET) initiative. Similar concerns around dissemination of publicly funded technologies led to technology-sharing programs to support the research community as part of the BRAIN Initiative.
Meng’s answer was to build the infrastructure herself.
The Access Problem
Building implantable sensors requires specialized microfabrication — thin layers of biocompatible polymers and metals, processed in cleanrooms, stacked into flexible structures that can bend with soft tissue. Meng’s lab had spent years developing that capability. Other labs wanted it. The graduate students who built it needed to graduate. There was no mechanism to share.
Meng borrowed a solution from USC’s own history. USC’s Information Sciences Institute was running MOSIS, a service that let universities share space on semiconductor wafers, splitting fabrication costs across dozens of research groups. She applied the same logic to polymer-based neural electrode arrays, consolidating different designs onto a single wafer, fabricating them together, and shipping devices to labs around the world.
The result, which she called the Polymer Implantable Electrode Foundry, ran for about seven years with support from the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative and sent roughly 2,000 devices to research groups across the country. What it revealed was that researchers did not want to design their own devices and send in files. They wanted full service. They wanted someone to do everything.
A Broken Supply Chain
OpenNerve is the answer to that — and to something more fundamental. More than 117 interviews with researchers, clinicians, and industry contacts, conducted as part of an NSF program in open-source ecosystem development, turned up a picture of a supply chain in serious trouble. The supply chain for medical device research is, as Meng put it, absolutely terrible. Single-source components with no alternatives. Tiny research labs too small to get prioritized by suppliers. A gap between what the field needs and what industry has any incentive to build.
OpenNerve has not yet been implanted in an animal. But Meng said the first full animal study is expected within the coming year. Once demonstrated, the goal is a sustainable open-source ecosystem: a community that can access the device, contribute improvements, and keep it evolving beyond any single lab.
A Department Built for This Moment
The Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering and USC’s Keck School of Medicine sits at exactly the intersection Meng’s work requires. Clinical translation is not an afterthought; it is the session’s stated theme, and every talk, as the session chair noted at the outset, represents work either already in patients or close to it.
Meng has been part of the department since 2004 and now serves as USC’s Vice Dean for Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The experience of moving technology through commercialization, she said, has changed how she thinks about problems and how she collaborates.
“I’m not going to be around for the next 50,” she said, “but maybe the next 20. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen.”
Published on September 17th, 2026
Last updated on September 17th, 2026
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