Giving Paralyzed People Their Bodies Back: The Swiss Company Dishing Out Medical Miracles
TL;DR
Onward is shipping spinal-cord neurotech now, not just demoing BCI futures — CEO Dave Marver says the company’s FDA-cleared external stimulator, ARC-EX, is already in clinics and approved for home use to improve hand strength and sensation in people with tetraplegia.
The most emotionally powerful use case may not be walking — it’s blood pressure — Marver and Ashley Vance highlight Julie from Belgium, who went from barely being able to get out of bed and considering euthanasia to resuming her PhD after spinal stimulation normalized her chronic low blood pressure.
Onward’s BCI strategy is deliberately conservative: safer, lower-hype, clinically viable — instead of penetrating the brain like Neuralink, Onward uses a 64-electrode epidural implant, licensed from a French research group, that sits outside the dura and has been implanted in humans for 8 years.
Spinal stimulation is the core product; BCI is just an add-on for movement intent — Marver keeps stressing that Onward’s expertise is translating brain signals into spinal stimulation patterns, and for walking you often don’t need massive channel counts because you’re activating large muscle groups in sequence.
The company is pursuing a very medtech path, with real timelines and regulatory milestones — Marver says Onward got ARC-EX to market in 2025, has FDA permission to start a large blood-pressure trial for its implantable ARC-IM system, and hopes that therapy reaches patients by 2028.
This all came from a rare researcher-surgeon duo in Lausanne — Gregoire Courtine and neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch built the field by figuring out how to stimulate the spinal cord to restore function in humans, then founding the company because existing hardware couldn’t deliver the therapy they envisioned.
The Breakdown
The miracle videos are real — but the public still barely knows this exists
Ashley Vance opens by grounding the conversation in the people he’s actually filmed in Switzerland: Suzanne Edwards walking again years after paralysis, Michelle using a clicker to trigger steps, and Julie whose life changed through blood-pressure regulation. His big frustration is simple: these stories feel miraculous, yet if you grabbed a random person off the street, they still probably wouldn’t know this is even an option.
Onward’s BCI is intentionally less flashy than Silicon Valley’s
Marver immediately cools the hype. He says Onward’s brain-computer interface is “comparatively boring” next to Neuralink or Precision, but that’s the point: it’s an epidural 64-electrode implant that sits outside the dura, avoids opening the brain itself, and has a much safer clinical profile. He keeps returning to the same theme — this is a responsible gen-one system meant to help real patients, not win the data-rate Olympics.
Why Onward may pair with Neuralink someday instead of competing head-on
One of the sharper parts of the conversation is Marver’s framing of BCI companies as recording platforms in search of a recovery target. Onward, by contrast, already knows the target: restore movement and other lost bodily functions through spinal stimulation, then use whatever BCI best captures movement intention. More channels could matter for hands and fingers, he says, but for legs and gait, the signal requirements are much simpler than the Valley hype cycle suggests.
Julie’s story reframes what paralysis actually takes away
The conversation shifts hard from walking to quality of life, and this is where the episode really lands. Ashley recounts Julie, paralyzed from the neck down after a car crash in her early 20s, spending hours trying to get out of bed because posture changes made her black out from low blood pressure. Marver says outsiders assume spinal cord injury is mostly about paralysis, but patients prioritize basics first: stable blood pressure, bladder control, bowel function, dignity, energy, the ability to get through the day.
The blood-pressure therapy could be one of Onward’s biggest near-term wins
Marver explains that Onward’s implant can stimulate different spinal regions depending on the function you’re trying to restore, and for blood pressure they’ve identified the exact thoracic area that controls vascular resistance. Patients expected to turn it on only when they felt faint, but instead use it all day because it makes them feel “more alive.” The company now has FDA permission to launch a large US trial and hopes to commercialize that therapy in 2028.
What’s available now, and what’s still in the pipeline
The first real product out is ARC-EX, Onward’s external stimulator worn on the neck to improve hand function by amplifying spared brain-to-spinal connections and enabling rehab. Marver says it received FDA de novo clearance, later home-use approval via 510(k), and CE mark in Europe. Meanwhile, the implanted ARC-IM platform is being studied for mobility, blood pressure, urinary incontinence through a Christopher Reeve Foundation-backed trial, Parkinson’s symptoms, and BCI-assisted upper- and lower-limb restoration.
Marver’s biggest warning: protect patients from overhype
This is the emotional center of the interview. Marver says he feels protective of people with paralysis because splashy headlines like “paralyzed man walks again” can be cruel if the therapy is still years away, imperfect, or inaccessible. He even says some people react angrily to these stories because until it’s realistic for them, the hope itself can hurt.
The Swiss origin story — and why this feels like medtech, not sci-fi
Near the end, Ashley gets Marver to tell the backstory: Gregoire Courtine, the charismatic EPFL neuroscientist, and Jocelyne Bloch, the functional neurosurgeon and first female neurosurgeon in Switzerland, built the science together in Lausanne. Courtine figured out the stimulation principles in animal work at UCLA and EPFL; Bloch made it real in humans; and because no existing hardware could deliver the therapy properly, they started Onward. Marver’s final distinction is very clear: this is pacemaker-style medtech built for durability and safety, not a moonshot gadget that happens to touch the nervous system.