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Elon Musk said on Wednesday that his brain tech 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 try to reduce the hardware issues experienced by the first entrants.
Neuralink is building a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to help paralyzed patients control technology such as mobile phones or computers with their thoughts. The company’s first system, called Telepathy, is centered around 64 “threads” inserted directly into the brain. According to Neuralink, the wires are thinner than a human hair and record neural signals through 1,024 electrodes 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 yet received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to commercialize its device.
in a live Musk said during a meeting with Neuralink executives on Wednesday that the company hopes to implant its device into “high single digits” of patients this year. It’s unclear when and where these procedures will take place, or whether the FDA has cleared Neuralink to perform them.
Spokespersons for Neuralink and the FDA could not immediately be reached for comment.
In January, Neuralink implanted its brain-computer interface into its first human patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Neuralink said in an article April Blog Post The surgery went “very smoothly”.
However, within a few weeks of the surgery, Neuralink said, some of the lines on the implant retracted from Abo’s brain. The company reportedly considered removing the implant, but the issue did not pose an immediate risk to Abbo’s safety wall street journal.
Musk and Neuralink executives said during a live broadcast on Wednesday that only about 15% of the channels in the Abo implant are functioning. Even so, he still uses BCI to watch movies, read, play chess and other video games – sometimes up to 70 hours a week.
For upcoming implants, the company says it’s working to mitigate recoil and take measurements more carefully. Neuralink President DJ Seo said one of the ways it plans to do this is to sculpt the surface of the skull to minimize gaps beneath the implant. Neuralink also plans to insert some wires deeper into brain tissue and track how much movement occurs.
“Now that we know retraction is possible, we’re going to insert at different depths,” said Dr. Matthew MacDougall, chief of neurosurgery at Neuralink.
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