Elon Musk Says First Human Patient Received Neuralink Brain Implant | (WIW)
Elon Musk’s controversial startup Neuralink has implanted a chip in a human brain for the first time, the billionaire said in a message to his X platform late Monday.
The surgery was performed on Sunday and the patient is recovering well, he added.
Musk’s announcement could be a major milestone in Neuralink’s efforts to bring the potentially game-changing technology out of the lab and into the real world. But he offered few details, and it remains unclear from Musk’s message how important a scientific advance the implantation represents.
The company received permission to study the safety and functionality of chip implants and surgical tools.
“Preliminary results show promise for detecting spikes in neurons,” said the world’s richest man and founder of Neuralink on social network X, which he owns.
Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy, he said in another message, adding that its first users will be people who have lost the use of their limbs.
“Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speedy typist or an auctioneer. That’s the point,” he wrote.
Neuralink has been working on implants to connect the human brain to a computer for half a decade, but the company came under scrutiny after a monkey died in 2022 while trying to get the animal to play Pong, one of the first video games. In December 2022, employees told Reuters the company rushed the market, leading to careless animal deaths and a federal investigation.
Last May, Neuralink received FDA approval for human clinical trials, and a few months later, the startup began recruiting patients with tetraplegia caused by cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The trial is part of what Neuralink calls its “PRIME Study,” short for “Precision Robotic Implanted Brain-Computer Interface,” to investigate the safety of its implant and surgical robot and test the device’s functionality. , the company announced in a September blog about recruiting test participants.
Experimental patients are surgically implanted with a chip in the part of the brain that controls the intention to move. The chip installed in the robot records and sends brain signals to the app, and the initial goal is to “give people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard with just their thoughts,” the company wrote in September.
Before Neuralink’s brain implants reach the wider market, they need official approval. In 2021, the FDA published a paper that mapped out the agency’s initial thinking about brain-computer interface devices and noted that the field is “moving quickly.”
While Neuralink and Musk have received considerable attention for their efforts to create a brain-computer interface, many other companies have been working in the field, including a company called Synchron, which was the first company to receive FDA approval to test the device. . in humans in 2021. Since then, Synchon has recruited and transplanted patients into the study.
“The idea of brain-neuron interfaces has great potential to help people with neurological diseases in the future,” Tara Spires-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, told the British Science Media Center on Tuesday. “However, most of these interfaces require invasive neurosurgery and are still experimental, so it will likely be many years before they are widely available.”.
