Musk's Biotech Legacy: A Visionary Breakthrough
While he was busy delivering Donald Trump to the US presidency, another achievement with Elon Musk's fingerprints was taking place. Science Corporation, a biotech startup launched by Max Hodak, claims to have achieved a breakthrough in brain-computer interface technology that could help patients with severe vision loss. Max Hodak is the co-founder and former president of Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company owned by Elon Musk.
In a significant development announced last week, a startup revealed that legally blind patients who had lost central vision were able to regain their sight through the company's retina implants. Clinical trials demonstrated that recipients could perform tasks such as reading and facial recognition.
Elon Musk's influence on BCI is substantial but overshadowed by his other achievements. When you've launched Starlink satellites, launched a Starship, unveiled Tesla's driverless taxi plans, and spent R 2,4 Billions during your lunch hour to make Donald Trump president, it's easy for some of your work to go unnoticed.
Before Neuralink, there wasn't much commercialization in brain-computer interface technology. Musk brought both financial resources and his celebrity status to this once obscure biotech field, making it one of the hottest sectors today.
According to Max Hodak, this is the first time that the restoration of the ability to read fluently has been definitively demonstrated in blind patients.
The device, called Prima, is a small, photovoltaic chip that's surgically implanted under the retina. It combines with a special pair of glasses with a built-in camera that projects visual data into the eye chip using invisible, near-infrared light.
When near-infrared rays strike the chip’s photovoltaic arrays, they not only power the device but also convert transmitted data into electrical signals. These signals stimulate the remaining retinal neurons, which then send impulses to the brain. As a result, the user regains rudimentary vision. Science Corp bought the technology that powers Prima from another startup, Pixium Vision, earlier this year.
In September, Neuralink announced that it had received a "breakthrough device" designation from the Food and Drug Administration for its "Blindsight" brain implant. Elon Musk claimed that this implant would enable even those who had lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.
More substantively, Science Corp's latest clinical trial, the findings of which are yet to be published as a study, involved 38 patients suffering from geographic atrophy, a form of central vision loss caused by age-related macular degeneration, or AMD — the leading cause of visual impairment for older adults.
Experts generally agree that the development represents a step forward for retinal prostheses, but they have expressed caution about the extent of the progress. James Weiland, an ophthalmologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research, told Wired that, while it was definitely a step forward for retinal prostheses, there were still details that remained unknown, which could help determine how significant the progress truly was. One of these details, he noted, was whether the patients had been using a magnified image when they recognized the letters.
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