Jonathan Raa | Only photo |
Elon Musk said Wednesday his braintech startup Neuralink hopes to implant its system into a second human patient “within the next week or so.” Executives also said the company is making changes to fix hardware issues experienced by its first participant.
Neuralink is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that aims to help patients with groundbreaking paralysis control. The company's first system, called Telepathy, consists of 64 “threads” inserted directly into the brain. The threads are thinner than a human hair and record neural signals via 1,024 electrodes, according to Neuralink's website.
BCIs have been studied in academia for decades, and several other companies, including Synchron, Paradromics, and Precision Neuroscience, are developing their own systems. No BCI company has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market their devices.
In a livestream with Neuralink executives on Wednesday, Musk said the company hopes to implant its device in a “high single digit number” of patients this year. It is still unclear when and where those procedures will take place.
A Neuralink spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
In January, Neuralink implanted its BCI in its first human patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, as part of an FDA-approved clinical trial.
Neuralink said in a blog post in April that the surgery went “extremely well.” In the weeks following the procedure, however, Neuralink said some of the implant's threads had pulled back from Arbaugh's brain. The company reportedly considered removing the implant, but the issue did not pose a direct threat to the patient's health and safety, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Musk and Neuralink executives said on the livestream that only about 15 percent of the channels in Arbaugh's implant are functional. Still, he uses the BCI to watch videos, read and play chess and other video games – sometimes up to 70 hours a week.
For future implants, the company is working to reduce retraction and measure it more accurately. Neuralink President DJ Seo said one way to achieve this is to shape the skull surface to minimize the gap under the implant.
Neuralink also plans to insert some threads deeper into brain tissue and track how much movement occurs, according to the company's livestream. Dr. Matthew MacDougall, head of neurosurgery at Neuralink, said that now that they know retraction is possible, they will insert threads “at different depths.”
“The FDA will continue to monitor the safety of subjects participating in the Neuralink implant study through required, periodic reports,” an FDA spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
