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Elon Musk said Wednesday that his brain technology startup Neuralink hopes to implant its system in a second human patient “in the next week or so.” Executives also said the company is making changes to address hardware issues it encountered with the first participant.
Neuralink is working on a brain-computer interface that aims to help patients with advanced technology control paralysis. The company’s first system, called Telepathy, involves 64 “threads” that are inserted directly into the brain. The threads are thinner than a human hair and record neural signals through 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 FDA approval to market its devices.
In a livestream with Neuralink executives on Wednesday, Musk said the company hopes to implant its device in “high single digits” of patients this year. It’s unclear when or where those procedures will take place.
A Neuralink spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
In January, Neuralink implanted its brain-brain interface in its first human patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, at the Barrow Neuroscience Institute in Phoenix, as part of a clinical study approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Neuralink said in an April blog post that the surgery went “very well.” However, in the weeks after the procedure, Neuralink said some of the threads from the implant had come loose from Arbo’s brain. The company reportedly considered removing the implant, but the problem did not pose an immediate risk to the patient’s health or safety, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Only about 15% of the channels in Arbo’s implant are working properly, Musk and Neuralink executives said in the livestream. Still, he uses the brain-computer interface to watch videos, read, and play chess and other video games — sometimes up to 70 hours a week.
For future implants, the company said it is working to mitigate and closely measure shrinkage. One way it plans to do this is to sculpt the surface of the skull to reduce the gap under the implant, said Neuralink President DJ Seo.
Neuralink also plans to insert some of the leads deeper into brain tissue and track how much movement occurs, according to the company’s livestream. Dr. Matthew MacDougall, Neuralink’s chief of neurosurgery, said it will insert the leads “at different depths” now that it knows withdrawal is a possibility.
“The FDA will continue to monitor the safety of the Neuralink implant study enrollees through regularly required reporting,” an FDA spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.
