A Former Neuralink President’s Vision Chip Let a Blind Patient Read Words Again

October 14 — Science Corporation chief executive Max Hodak has announced that the company has implanted its vision-restoring chip PRIMA in the first patient with Stargardt disease, an inherited eye condition that progressively damages central vision. Hodak, a former president and co-founder of the brain-computer interface company Neuralink, told the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that developing PRIMA is one part of the company’s broader goal of building new kinds of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

“The retina is part of the central nervous system,” Hodak said in his talk. “We think cochlear implants, retinal prostheses and motor prostheses are all different kinds of brain-computer interface.”

Hodak painted a vision in which BCIs are widely used across medical technology, not just to control computers.

The PRIMA chip is already approved for commercial use in Europe, for patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a late stage of age-related macular degeneration. The company believes the technology can also be used for many other diseases, including Stargardt disease, for which there is currently no cure.

Stargardt disease attacks the outer layer of the retina, causing the eye’s photoreceptor cells to gradually die off, while the inner retina that carries visual signals to the brain may be preserved. A blind spot appears in the centre of the visual field and keeps growing over time. About 150,000 people worldwide have lost their sight to the disease.

“One advantage of this approach is that, if you think of the brain as a computer, vision is essentially electric potential — electrical signals travelling along the optic nerve,” Hodak said. “As far as the brain is concerned, that is all vision is. So as long as you can get the optic nerve to send the right signals to the rest of the brain, you can restore vision for the patient.”

The company says the first Stargardt patient received the PRIMA implant at the Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia in May this year, and that the clinical trial is still under way. The patient saw a single letter in the first rehabilitation session, and could read words by the second.

To use the device, a patient undergoes an hour-long operation in which a tiny chip is implanted at the back of the eye, where the photoreceptors have degenerated. The patient then wears glasses fitted with a camera, which sends the scene it captures to the chip. The implant is essentially an artificial photoreceptor.

“The implant in this patient is 2 millimetres by 2 millimetres, placed at the back of the eye,” Hodak said. “The patient’s visual experience is like looking through a straw. It cannot provide wide-field colour vision; it forms only a small black-and-white image in central vision, but that image is sharp and high-contrast, and several letters can be made out at once. The next goal is to widen the field of view. To make a larger implant we would have to work with the curved shape of the eye, and we need to make the electrodes smaller to approach the eye’s native level of detail.”

“We have already identified a clear technical path,” he continued. “The next generation is in development and is expected to enter human trials next year; within five years we hope to bring vision close to natural sight.”

After leaving Neuralink, Hodak founded Science Corporation in 2021, and the company announced plans at the time to develop advanced neuroengineering and brain-computer interface technology. But it intended first to prove that the technology works and to build a sustainable business model, which is why it started with restoring vision for people with visual impairments.

As for Science Corporation’s BCI technology, the company has said its sensors will be implanted inside the skull and attached to the surface of the brain — unlike Neuralink’s devices, which are placed directly inside brain tissue.

The company says the device could be used to treat a range of neurological conditions, such as monitoring neural activity in patients with brain tumours.

“In the short term, our first clinical indication has not been announced publicly; it is a neurodegenerative disease that most people will have heard of,” Hodak said. “We are also studying stroke-related applications. For example, if a stroke has killed part of a patient’s brain tissue, connecting signals between two different deep regions of the brain is like adding a new cortical area, as if a whole new brain region had appeared — something traditional electrodes cannot do. In the long run, the company’s ultimate mission is to understand how the brain produces consciousness and to learn to build artificial brains.”

Hodak also said Science Corporation believes that many people will use some kind of BCI in the future. Its current product is not designed for “healthy 40-year-olds,” but the company thinks most people will need some kind of BCI by the time they are in their sixties or seventies.

“We want to find ways not just to extend lifespan, but to extend healthy lifespan,” he said.