He spent his PhD wiring electronics into the spinal cord. Then he pointed the same engineering at a brain tumor and asked it a question.
Most cancer treatment speaks in three languages: the scalpel, the molecule, the beam. Ben Woodington is convinced there is a fourth, and that it has been sitting in plain sight inside every patient the whole time. The body runs on electricity. So do tumors. His company, Coherence Neuro, is building the hardware to listen in on that conversation - and then to interrupt it.
The product is called SOMA-1. It is a minimally invasive, MRI-safe brain-computer interface, roughly the size of a shirt button, slipped in during a neurosurgery a patient was already having. Once seated, it does two things at once: it records the electrical activity around a tumor, and it delivers targeted electrical stimulation back. Record and modulate. A bioelectronic dialogue, in real time, from inside the skull.
Woodington is the co-founder and CEO. He is not, by training, an oncologist. He is a chemist who became an engineer who became a neurotechnologist - and that strange path is exactly why Coherence exists. He kept the engineer's habit of asking the obvious question out loud: if neurotech can move a paralyzed limb, why can't it touch a tumor?
Around 2018, in a Cambridge lab, Woodington met Elise Jenkins. She was an electrical engineer who had designed sensors for Formula One cars before turning her attention to a much smaller, stranger machine: the cancer cell. Jenkins studied how tumors generate their own electrical activity and wire themselves into the nervous system, forming junctions with neurons as if they belonged there.
She handed Woodington a stack of research. One thread ran back more than two decades, to a finding that cancer cells cultured next to neurons grow dramatically faster. The nervous system, it seemed, was not a bystander to cancer. It was a participant - feeding it, signaling to it, helping it spread.
Woodington read, and re-read. "It took me a while to digest the papers," he has said, "and then go, 'Oh man, why is no one looking at this?'" His spinal-cord interface work, it turned out, transferred almost directly. The protocols he had built to read and write electrical signals in the cord were the same tools you would need to do it near a tumor.
There was a more personal weight, too. At a cancer support group, a grieving mother told him her son had died of glioblastoma thirty years earlier - and that patients today are handed the same options he had. Three decades, no new menu. Family experience with cancer hardened the conviction. The opportunity, Woodington decided, was too big to walk past.
It seemed too important an opportunity to ignore. Certainly the biggest I've seen in neuro-tech.- Ben Woodington
Ex-Formula One sensor engineer turned neuro-oncology researcher. She brought the biology - how cancer cells make electricity and splice into neural circuits. Woodington brought the devices. Their first collaborations were co-authored papers; the company came next.
Woodington likes a clean comparison. The existing electrical cancer therapy, Novocure's Optune, is a cap of electrodes worn on the outside of the head. SOMA, he says, is to that what the iPod was to the Walkman - smaller, smarter, and able to do something the old device never could: listen.
First targets include glioblastoma, with the broader program eyeing other aggressive cancers. Academic partners span Cambridge, Stanford, Monash University and the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Woodington frames Coherence as an engineering problem, not a research mystery. "There are no more science challenges. This is an engineering optimization piece now." The bet: move fast, run human studies, build a dataset nobody else has.
He rejects the model of inventing an expensive surgical robot first. Design the implant to fit the operating room and workflow that already exist, and you remove the biggest barrier between the device and the patient.
The threat that keeps him up isn't approval - it's whether the system will pay for the device once it works. He wants an integrated campus: fabrication, engineering, and a neuro-oncology clinic, all under one roof, to compress the loop from lab to patient.
This is the beginning of a new chapter in medicine - digitally controlled therapeutics that will reshape the future of healthcare.- Ben Woodington
Before brains, there was breath. Woodington started in medical devices the unglamorous way - building smart nebulizers at Philips, then leading the development of intelligent drug-delivery technologies at Vectura. It was applied chemistry meeting embedded engineering: make a device smart enough to deliver the right dose at the right moment.
He went back to Cambridge for a master's in neurotechnology, then a PhD in the lab of George Malliaras, a pioneer of bioelectronics and flexible electronics. There, Woodington built minimally invasive spinal-cord and brain interfaces, contributing to peer-reviewed work on restoring motor function after spinal cord injury. The throughline across every job: thin, flexible electronics that can hold a conversation with living tissue.
That conversation is the whole thesis of Coherence. Woodington identifies first as a neurotechnologist, and he picked oncology not because it is where neurotech usually goes, but because he believes it is the fastest, highest-impact route to prove the technology matters. "Neurotechnology is crazy," he says - and his real frustration is that so few people are aiming it at the diseases that kill the most.
The ambition is deliberately enormous. Coherence has floated a vision of a $100 billion industry sitting at the seam of neuroscience and oncology - bigger, on paper, than the peak annual sales of the best-selling cancer drugs. The nearer-term goal is more concrete, and more human: "Our first goal is to double overall survival in these patients." After that, the dream is to turn an aggressive tumor into something chronic - a condition you monitor and manage and live alongside, for decades, instead of a sentence.
For a century, cancer care has stood on three legs: surgery to cut it out, drugs to poison it, radiation to burn it. Coherence's argument is that there is a fourth modality the field has barely touched - controlled electrical signaling - and that it works on the part of the disease the other three struggle to reach. Tumors do not grow in isolation. They recruit the nervous system, drawing on its electrical chatter to spread and survive.
Woodington describes the approach as bioelectronic therapy: decoding and modulating the body's own electrical language. Coherence breaks it into three modes of action. There is targeted electrotherapy, hitting the tumor directly with fields tuned to disrupt it. There is immunomodulation, nudging the immune response. And there is neuromodulation, interrupting the signals that pass between nerves and cancer. SOMA-1 is the instrument that delivers all three, and the sensor that measures whether they worked.
The company's stated mission stretches beyond the brain. The early target is glioblastoma, the aggressive brain cancer with the stubborn, unchanged menu of options. But the broader program names other hard cancers in its sights, including triple-negative breast cancer and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma - diseases where the electrical conversation between tumor and nerve may run just as deep. Three scientific pillars hold it together: the neurotechnology of precise implantable devices, the neurobiology of mapping how cancer and the nervous system talk, and the machine learning that reads the signals and personalizes the therapy in real time.
The $10M seed was led by Topology Ventures and Artesian, with Blackbird, Possible Ventures, XEIA Venture Partners, Jumpspace, Divergent Capital, SmartGate, Spacewalk and a roster of angels - among them Matt Krisiloff, Linhao Zhang and Tim Shi.
Woodington says the hardest people to find - and the ones he hunts for - are seasoned electrical and embedded-systems engineers who can code-switch across disciplines and climb a steep learning curve fast. The science, he insists, is settled; the bottleneck is execution.
Sources: Coherence Neuro, NeuroFounders, Owl Posting, MassDevice, XEIA Venture Partners, Implantable-Device. Reported facts only.