Neuralink, Elon Musk’s startup, released a live video on Wednesday showing a patient using the company’s brain implant to move a mouse and play chess on a computer.
Noland Arbaugh, 29, is the first human patient to be implanted with a Neuralink device. The company is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to help severely paralyzed patients control external technology using only neural signals. Musk said Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy a post on his social media site X in January.
In a video shown on X on Wednesday, Abo said he became a quadriplegic after a diving accident about eight years ago. He said the procedure to get the Neuralink implant, which requires the patient to remove part of the skull and insert electrodes into the brain tissue, is “super simple.” He said he was discharged from the hospital the next day.
“It’s not perfect, I would say we’ve had some issues,” Abo said. “I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to do, but it has changed my life.”
BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and converts them into external technological commands. If functioning properly, patients with serious degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually use these systems to send text messages or scroll through social media with their thoughts.
Several companies, including Paradromics, Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech, and Precision Neuroscience, have developed BCI systems with these capabilities, and many of these companies have also implanted devices in human patients. Neuralink is particularly well-known in the field, partly due to the high profile of Musk, who is also Neuralink’s CEO Tesla and SpaceX.
In many ways, the capabilities Neuralink showed off in Wednesday’s video aren’t new. Dr. Nader Pouratian, chief of neurosurgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said researchers have been developing and studying BCI technology for years.
“Some of the things we’ve been able to do for decades, like controlling a cursor in two dimensions, are actually very simple for those of us working in this field to do with any brain signal we receive. ,” he said in an interview with CNBC earlier this month.
He said that brain-computer interfaces are very exciting, but there are still many practical challenges that need to be solved, such as how to interpret and analyze brain signals and make them work. He said he believed transparency about progress within academia and the wider BCI industry would be key to progress.
Neuralink began recruiting patients for its first-in-human clinical trial in the fall after receiving approval for the study from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in May, according to a company. Blog article. According to a post on
Beyond Musk’s post, Neuralink has shared few details about the scope or nature of its trials.As of Wednesday, the trial was not listed on ClinicalTrials.gov, the website for most medical device companies Share information Research about them to help the public and other healthcare professionals understand their ambitions.
It’s unclear how many patients were enrolled in Neuralink’s trial, or what the trial was trying to prove. The company must go through multiple rounds of safety and efficacy testing before it can receive final approval from the FDA and enter the market.
Neuralink did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
There’s reason to be hopeful about Neuralink’s technology, said Dr. Marco Baptista, chief scientific officer of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which provides resources to people with paralysis. He told CNBC in early March that BCI technology could have a meaningful impact on patients, but like all emerging devices, Neuralink’s system should be viewed with skepticism.
For example, he said he would like to see more traditional scientific reports from Neuralink to learn more about its technology.Neuralink was reportedly listed as an author on a 2019 white paper Postgraduate entrance examination.
“My hope is that this information will start to come out through these mechanisms that science requires, which is through peer-reviewed publications,” he said. “That’s not happening yet. Other companies are doing it.”
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