Neuralink has successfully implanted a second patient with its brain-chip device, according to the company’s owner Elon Musk.
The brain-computer interface (BCI) is designed to give paralysed people the ability to control external secondary devices with thoughts.
Musk announced the news on a podcast, saying the procedure had gone “extremely well”. The start-up founder unveiled few other details, stating only the second participant had a spinal cord injury similar to the first patient implanted with the device earlier this year.
The device uses 1,024 electrodes to detect neural activity – Musk said that 400 of the implanted electrodes in the second patient were up and running.
"There's a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It's working very well,” Musk said on the podcast hosted by computer scientist Lex Fridman.
Neuralink reported positive findings from the first implant – even releasing videos of the patient playing chess on a computer using his thoughts.
However, the implant encountered problems a few months ago, with the device becoming partly detached from the patient’s brain. The implant’s functionality started to decline after some of the threads that connect the chip with the brain began retracting.
Neuralink raised $280m in funding in August last year to help conduct human trials.
Despite generating buzz in the neurotechnology space, Neuralink has encountered its fair share of challenges. Reuters has reported that inspectors from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found problems with record keeping and quality controls for experiments on animals. As per Reuters in late 2022, sources said the number of animal deaths was higher than it should have been, leading the company to face a probe by the US Department of Agriculture.
BrainGate has developed one of the more mature BCIs. The company published results in the Neurology Journal, indicating a good long-term safety profile and has previously shown positive proof-of-concept demonstrations. US-based Synchron completed patient enrolment in an early feasibility study for its BCI in September 2023.
Also generating waves in the space is Clinatec, a biomedical research centre located on the CEA campus in Grenoble, France. The company’s Wimagine device is semi-invasive as it sits on the surface of the brain using 64 electrodes to measure activity from the motor cortex. In May 2023, Clinatec published results in Nature demonstrating its device helped restore communication between the brain and spinal cord. As a result of the implant, a patient with chronic tetraplegia was able to stand and walk naturally.
