Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink streamed a live video on Wednesday that showed a patient using the corporate’s brain implant to maneuver a mouse and play chess on a pc.
Noland Arbaugh, 29, is the primary human patient to ever get implanted with Neuralink’s device. The corporate is developing a brain-computer interface, or a BCI, that goals to assist patients with severe paralysis control external technologies using only neural signals. Neuralink’s first product is named Telepathy, Musk said in a post on his social media site X in January.
Within the video Wednesday, which was streamed on X, Arbaugh said he became a quadriplegic after suffering a diving accident around eight years ago. He said the surgery to get Neuralink’s implant, which requires patients to remove a portion of their skull to insert electrodes into the brain tissue, was “super easy.” He was released from the hospital the subsequent day, he said.
“It is not perfect, I might say that we’ve got run into some issues,” Arbaugh said. “I don’t desire people to think that that is the tip of the journey, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done, however it has already modified my life.”
A BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. If the system functions properly, patients with severe degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually text or scroll through social media with their minds.
Several corporations like Paradromics, Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech and Precision Neuroscience have developed BCI systems with these capabilities, and lots of of them have also implanted devices in human patients. Neuralink is especially well-known in the sector on account of the high profile of Musk, who can also be the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
In some ways, the capabilities Neuralink demonstrated in its video Wednesday usually are not recent. Dr. Nader Pouratian, chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said researchers have been developing and studying BCI technology for years.
“There are things that we have been capable of do for a long time, like control a cursor in two dimensions, which actually, for those of us who’re in the sector, is amazingly easy to do as soon as you’ll be able to get any brain signal,” he told CNBC in an interview earlier this month.
He said there may be quite a bit of excitement around BCIs, but admitted there may be a bunch of practical challenges to work out, like the right way to interpret and analyze brain signals and make them useful. Pouratian said he thinks transparency from each academia and the broader BCI industry about advancements can be key for progress.
Neuralink began recruiting patients for its first in-human clinical trial in the autumn after it received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conduct the study in May 2023, in line with a blog post. In January, Musk said the corporate implanted its device in a human for the primary time, and that the patient, now revealed to be Arbaugh, was “recovering well,” in line with a post on X.
Other than Musk’s posts, Neuralink has shared only a few details concerning the scope or the character of its trial. As of Wednesday, the trial isn’t listed on the web site clinicaltrials.gov, which is where most medical device corporations share information about their research to assist inform the general public and other health-care professionals about their ambitions.
It isn’t clear what number of patients are participating in Neuralink’s trial, or what the trial is attempting to exhibit. The corporate may have to undergo several rounds of safety and efficacy testing before it could possibly get the FDA’s final seal of approval and go to market.
Neuralink didn’t reply 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 individuals who have change into paralyzed. He told CNBC in early March that BCI technology could make a meaningful impact on patients, but like all emerging devices, Neuralink’s system ought to be regarded with skepticism.
He said he would love to see more traditional scientific reports from Neuralink to learn more about its technology, as an illustration. Neuralink is listed as an creator on one white paper from 2019, in line with PubMed.
“I’m hopeful that this information will start to return out through these mechanisms which can be needed in science, and that’s through peer reviewed publications,” Baptista said. “That hasn’t happened yet. Other corporations are doing it.”