From AI Medicine to Brain-Computer Interfaces

DLD Health x BAIOSPHERE, the joint conference organised by DLD, Burda’s international innovation platform and the Bavarian AI agency BAIOSPHERE, brought together around 400 participants from the worlds of science, business, politics and medicine at the Literaturhaus in Munich today (12th June 2026). 

Speakers included Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder, Minister of State Markus Blume, Nobel laureate Ferenc Krausz, AI-pioneers Jürgen Schmidhuber and Björn Ommer in a rare joint appearance, as well as Susan Thomas from Google Health, alongside numerous internationally renowned founders and researchers. As a cultural prelude, Philipp Hochmair, the current "Jedermann" at the Salzburg Festival, opened the conference. 

The conference focused on the big questions in AI medicine: from prevention and clinical application to new technologies such as brain-computer interfaces. For the first time, Steffi Czerny and Alessia Sinzger co-hosted the event as the new DLD co-leaders – together with Michael Klimke from BAIOSPHERE.  

“DLD has always been at its strongest where different worlds collide; with DLD Health, we are applying this concept to one of the most crucial fields of the future: the convergence of AI, biology, medicine, entrepreneurship and social responsibility.” 

Steffi Czerny & Alessia Sinzger, DLD 

Particular attention was paid to the panel ‘Invasive Brain-Computer Interface Implantation: State of the Art and Future Perspectives’: For the first time, Prof. Dr Bernhard Meyer, Prof. Dr Simon Jacob (both TUM) and patient Michael Mehringer appeared together on stage. In July 2025, Mehringer became the first person in Europe to have a brain-computer interface (BCI) with 256 microelectrodes implanted. As early as 2022, Meyer and Jacob had caused an international sensation with the world’s first BCI implant in a stroke patient with severe aphasia. 

What took place on stage at the Literaturhaus today has deep roots: as early as 1995, Burda brought together brain researchers, computer scientists and philosophers at the Mind Revolution conference to discuss interfaces between the brain and computers – and in doing so developed the concept of neuroethics. A year later, the “Burda Health Online Service” was presented by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in person at the Fifth International WWW conference in Paris. 

This continuity is reflected in the DLD programme: Uğur Şahin spoke at DLD about mRNA research – in 2016, years before the world knew his name. Demis Hassabis discussed AI and protein folding at DLD, long before AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize. Anne Wojcicki presented 23andMe at DLD when genomics still sounded like science fiction.