Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink live-streamed a video on Wednesday that showed a patient using the corporate’s brain implant to maneuver a mouse and play chess on a computer.
Noland Arbaugh (29) is the primary patient to receive the Neuralink device. The company is developing a brain-computer interface, or BCI, to assist patients with severe paralysis control external technologies using only neural signals. Musk said Neuralink’s first product is known as Telepathy post in January on his social networking site X.
In Wednesday’s video, which was streamed on X, Arbaugh said he became a quadriplegic about eight years ago after a diving accident. He said Neuralink implant surgery, which requires patients to remove part of their skull to insert electrodes into brain tissue, was “extremely easy.” He added that he was discharged from the hospital the subsequent day.
“It’s not perfect. “I would say we ran into some issues,” Arbaugh said. “I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey, there is still a lot to do, but it has already changed my life.”
BCI is a system that decodes brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. If the system works properly, patients with serious degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually have the opportunity to send text messages or browse social media with their thoughts.
Several firms, corresponding to Paradromics, Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech, and Precision Neuroscience, have developed BCI systems with this capability, and lots of have also implanted the devices in humans. Neuralink is especially well-known on this field as a consequence of the high profile of Musk, who can be CEO and SpaceX.
In some ways, the capabilities Neuralink demonstrated in its Wednesday video usually are not latest. Dr. Nader Pouratian, chief of the Department of Neurological Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said scientists have been developing and studying BCI technology for years.
“There are things we’ve been able to do for decades, like controlling a cursor in two dimensions, which actually for those of us who are in the field are extremely simple once we can get any brain signal,” he told CNBC in interview earlier this month.
He said there’s a lot of excitement about BCI, but he acknowledged that there are numerous practical challenges that have to be solved, corresponding to methods to interpret and analyze brain signals and make them useful. Pouratian said he believes the important thing to progress shall be transparency from each academia and the broader BCI industry about progress.
Neuralink began recruiting patients for its first human clinical trial in the autumn after receiving U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the study in May 2023, based on the study. blog post. In January, Musk said the corporate had implanted its device in a human for the primary time and that the patient, now revealed to be Arbaugh, was “recovering well,” based on a post on X.
Beyond Musk’s posts, Neuralink has shared only a few details in regards to the scope and nature of the method. As of Wednesday, information in regards to the trial shouldn’t be listed on the web site Clinictrials.gov, where most medical device manufacturers are situated. share information about their research to assist inform the general public and other health professionals about their ambitions.
It is unclear what number of patients are participating within the Neuralink study or what the study is meant to indicate. The company might want to undergo several rounds of safety and effectiveness testing before it could gain final FDA approval and enter the market.
Neuralink didn’t reply to CNBC’s request for comment.
There is reason to be hopeful about Neuralink’s technology, said Dr. Marco Baptista, chief scientific officer of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which provides resources to paralyzed people. He told CNBC in early March that BCI technology could have a significant impact on patients, but like all latest devices, the Neuralink system must be viewed with skepticism.
He said he would really like to see Neuralink’s more traditional science reports to learn more in regards to the technology involved, for instance. According to. Neuralink is listed as an writer in a single white paper from 2019 PubMed.
“I hope that this information will begin to be disclosed through the mechanisms needed in science, i.e. through peer-reviewed publications,” Baptista said. “It hasn’t happened yet. Other companies do it.”
