The Neurotechnology Market

The market for neurotechnolgy products is poised to become one of the most dramatic growth areas of the 21st Century. Spurred on by medical developments and discoveries that cure disease, alleviate suffering, and generally improve the quality of life, many leading research institutions and health care firms have gained the world's attention and respect in recent years. Within the biomedical technology industries, there is one field that stands out not only for its promise of restoring function to human patients, but also for carrying over biomedical concepts and processes to the industrial and information processing sectors. That field is what we call neurotechnology.

Definition
Unlike the field of biotechnology, which concerns itself with pharmacological and genetic engineering efforts to understand and control DNA, genetic material, and other complex biological molecules, neurotechnology is concerned with electronic and engineering methods of understanding and controlling nervous system function.

Some of the very early firms in the neurotechnology field have scored great success building devices that restore hearing to deaf people, restore arm and hand function to quadriplegics, and accomplish a host of other feats using techniques of functional electrical stimulation of the human body. We believe that government and private research funding in this area will lead to one of the great spinoffs of our time as biomedical engineers apply their knowledge and experience building devices that sense and stimulate the human nervous system and interface with non-human systems such as computers, training systems, and virtual reality.

Funding
We also believe that the field of neurotechnology offers the promise of generating significant venture capital interest and funding, despite the current depressed state of new technology ventures. After the disappointing results shown by many venture-funded Internet, e-commerce, and dotcom firms that lacked a proven revenue base, technology-oriented venture capitalists will be looking for new opportunities in markets where the opportunities are relatively salient. Neurotechnology, with its promise and proven record at such tasks as restoring hearing to deaf patients and hand function to quadriplegics, offers such a clear opportunity. Moreover, much of the risk in financing technology development in this field will be borne by government and private medical institutions who do not necessarily have the same ROI expectations as the venture capital community.

For example, the National Institutes of Health has recently founded an Institute of Biomedical Imaging and BioEngineering, and overall funding for the NIH and medical research has been increased dramatically in the new Bush administration. Also, privately funded research organizations, such as the Alfred Mann Institute of Biomedical Engineering, which was recently formed with a $100 million endowment at the University of Southern California, will help underwrite much of the technology risk confronting this new industry.

Industry Whitepapers
Neurotech Reports editors have prepared in-depth whitepapers on a number of business and technology issues confronting the neurotechnology industry. These short reports, ranging from 15 to 32 pages in length, cover technology areas such as deep-brain stimulation, brain-computer interfaces, and visual prostheses, as well as business issues such as venture capital funding, government funding, and management issues. For a list of available whitepapers, click this link:

Whitepapers

Market Research Report
Neurotech Reports has developed a market research report entitled "The Market for Neurotechnology: 2008-2012."

This newly updated study offers detailed information about the market potential of each application segment of the industry, profiles of each of the current players, and projections on the size and growth rates of the market over the next five years. For more information on the contents of the report, click here:

Report Contents