Neuralink performs first transdural brain implant, keeping the dura intact
Neuralink has performed its first transdural surgery, inserting the electrode threads of its brain-computer interface straight through the dura and into the cortex while keeping the protective membrane intact. The company describes it as the first time the technique has been used in its human clinical trials, and Elon Musk called it "a very big deal", saying it "greatly improves the safety and ease of interfacing with the brain".
The dura is the tough, leather-like outer layer of the brain, sitting directly beneath the skull. Standard Neuralink surgery involved opening the dura and removing a portion of it (a durectomy) so the robot could see the cortex and insert electrodes onto its surface. The transdural procedure deletes that step entirely: the robotic insertion device drives the threads directly through the intact dura, which Neuralink says makes the operation faster, simpler, safer and easier to scale to a larger patient population.
The first-of-its-kind procedure was carried out in May 2026 at University Health Network's Toronto Western Hospital in Toronto, Canada, alongside Dr Andres Lozano. The participant was controlling a cursor with their thoughts within an hour of surgery, and recovery is progressing as expected.
Leaving the dura in place created two engineering challenges: the robot could no longer see the underlying blood vessels, nor gauge the distance to the cortical surface. Neuralink used ICG video angiography — an injected dye imaged under infrared light — to make vessels glow through the dura so threads could be steered around them, and optical coherence tomography (OCT) to measure the distance from the dural surface to the cortex with high precision. The needle diameter was also increased slightly to reliably penetrate the membrane, validated against a synthetic dural proxy across hundreds of benchtop insertions.
Neuralink devices remain investigational and have not been approved by the FDA or other regulatory authorities.
Sources: Neuralink — "Our First Transdural Procedure"; Elon Musk on X.
