Blackboard from Precision Neuroscience.
Source: Precision Neuroscience
It happened so fast that Craig Mermel missed it.
He stood in a busy operating room in West Virginia, waiting for a surgeon to position a Precision Neuroscience neural implant system in a conscious patient’s brain for the first time. Mermel, Precision’s president and chief product officer, said he looked away for a moment, and when he turned around, the corporate’s paper-thin electrode array was already in place.
Inside seconds, a high-resolution real-time rendering of the patient’s brain activity appeared on the screen. In keeping with Precision, the system provided the best resolution image of human thought ever recorded.
“It was incredibly surreal,” Mermel told CNBC in an interview. “The character of the information and our ability to visualise it, you recognize, I get … chills.”
The procedure observed by Mermel was the first human clinical trial in the corporate’s history.
Founded in 2021 by the co-founder of Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup, Precision is an industry competitor that helps paraplegic patients operate digital devices by decoding their neural signals. BCI is a system that decrypts brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies, and a number of other corporations reminiscent of Synchron, Paradromics and Blackrock Neurotech have also created devices with this feature. Precision announced a $41 million Series B financing round in January.
The corporate’s flagship BCI system, Layer 7 Cortical Interface, is an arrangement of electrodes resembling a chunk of adhesive tape. Since it’s thinner than a human hair, Precision says it could actually conform to the surface of the brain without damaging any tissue, and within the study, the Precision system was temporarily placed on the brains of three patients who had already undergone neurosurgery to remove tumors.
Because the technology performed as expected, future research will take a look at further applications in clinical and behavioral contexts, Mermel said. If the trials go in keeping with Precision’s plan, patients with serious degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually regain some ability to speak with family members by moving cursors, typing and even accessing social media with their minds.
While the human trial is a milestone, the road to bringing this sort of technology to market is long. Precision has yet to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its device, and the corporate might want to work closely with regulators to successfully complete several extremely thorough rounds of testing and safety data collection.
No BCI company has been in a position to earn the ultimate FDA seal since June.
“The goal is to supply a tool that may also help people living with a everlasting disability, so this is the first step,” Mermel said. “Now the true work begins.”
Doctors are preparing the Precision Neuroscience system.
Photo: Anna von Scheling
In keeping with Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Precision, several different academic medical centers have offered support in the corporate’s pilot clinical trial. The corporate was working with West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, and each organizations prepared for the procedures greater than a 12 months upfront, Rapoport said.
Rapoport, who has been working on BCI technology for greater than 20 years, said seeing the Precision technology on a human patient’s brain for the first time was an “incredibly rewarding” milestone.
“I can not emotionally describe what it’s like,” he said. “It was amazing.”
Dr. Peter Konrad, chair of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute’s Department of Neurosurgery, was the surgeon who physically placed the Precision System on patients’ brains during their procedures.
Konrad said it was an easy process that was like placing a chunk of tissue paper on the brain.
The patients had the Precision system on their brains for quarter-hour. Certainly one of them was asleep through the procedure, but two patients were woke up in order that Layer 7 could capture their brain activity as they spoke.
“I’ve never seen a lot data, 1,000 real-time channels, electrical activity, just brainwashing when someone was talking,” Konrad told CNBC. “It was literally such as you were watching someone think. It’s quite amazing.”
Electrodes are already utilized in practice to assist neurosurgeons monitor brain activity during surgery, however the resolution provided by conventional systems is low. Konrad said standard electrodes are around 4mm in size, while the Precision chip can hold between 500 and 1,000 contacts in that size.
“It is the difference between taking a look at the world with an old black and white camera and seeing it in high definition,” he said.
Konrad said it was too early for patients on this study to see any direct profit from the technology.
Precision Neuroscience board in comparison with a penny.
Photo: Anna von Scheling
Ultimately, Precision hopes its technology won’t require open brain surgery in any respect. In an interview with CNBC in January, co-founder and CEO Michael Mager said a surgeon should have the ability to implant the array by making a skinny slit within the skull and slipping the device like a letter right into a letterbox. The gap can be lower than a millimeter thick, so small that patients don’t must shave their hair for the procedure.
Precision’s minimally invasive approach is intentional as BCI’s competitors Paradromics and Neuralink have designed systems designed to be inserted directly into brain tissue.
Rapoport said inserting a BCI into the brain would offer a transparent picture of what each neuron was doing, but it surely risks tissue damage and is difficult to scale. That said, the extent of detail is not needed for speech decoding or other features Precision is aiming for, so it was a compromise the corporate was ultimately willing to make.
In the approaching weeks, Precision will conduct the identical procedure with two more patients as a part of a pilot clinical trial. Rapoport said the corporate presented its initial leads to a scientific journal and that releasing the information to the general public can be a “huge next step”.
Precision is also conducting similar research in healthcare systems reminiscent of Mount Sinai in Latest York and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Rapoport said Precision hopes to get full FDA approval for its first-generation device next 12 months.
“The early results are extremely satisfying for us,” said Rapoport. “If you happen to’re lucky, there are a number of times in your life when you’ll be able to see something before anyone else on the planet sees it.”