Elon Musk said Wednesday his braintech startup Neuralink hopes to implant its system right into a second human patient “within the next week or so.” Executives also said the corporate is making changes to repair hardware issues experienced by its first participant.
Neuralink is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that goals to assist patients with groundbreaking paralysis control. The company's first system, called Telepathy, consists of 64 “threads” which can be inserted directly into the brain. The threads are thinner than a human hair and record neural signals via 1,024 electrodes, in keeping with Neuralink's report. website.
BCIs have been studied in academia for a long time, and several other other corporations, including Synchron, Paradromics, and Precision Neuroscience, are developing their very own systems. No BCI company has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market their devices.
In a Live broadcast Musk told Neuralink executives on Wednesday that the corporate hopes to implant its device in a “high single digit number” of patients later this yr. It continues to be unclear when and where those procedures will happen.
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, on the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, as a part of an FDA-approved clinical trial.
Neuralink said in a Blog post from April that the surgery went “extremely well.” In the weeks following the procedure, nevertheless, Neuralink said a few of the implant's threads had pulled back from Arbaugh's brain. The company reportedly considered removing the implant, but the issue didn’t pose a direct risk to the patient's health and safety, in keeping with 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 observe videos, read and play chess and other video games – sometimes as much as 70 hours per week.
For future implants, the corporate is working to scale back retraction and measure it more accurately. Neuralink President DJ Seo said one strategy to achieve that is to shape the skull surface to reduce the gap under the implant.
Neuralink also plans to insert some threads deeper into brain tissue and track how much movement occurs, in keeping with the corporate's livestream. Dr. Matthew MacDougall, head of neurosurgery at Neuralink, said that now that they know retraction is feasible, they’ll 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 press release to CNBC.
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