Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he expects a wireless brain chip developed by his company Neuralink to begin human clinical trials in six months, after the company missed earlier timelines he had set. .
The company is developing a brain-chip interface that it says could enable disabled patients to move and communicate again, Musk said Wednesday, adding that it would also target vision rehabilitation.
Neuralink, based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, has been testing on animals in recent years as it seeks approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical trials in people.
“We want to be very careful and confident that it will work well before we put a device in a human,” Musk said during a public update on the device.
Speaking to a select crowd of invited guests in a presentation at Neuralink headquarters that lasted nearly three hours, Musk emphasized the pace at which the company is developing its device.
“Progress at first, especially as it applies to humans, may seem painfully slow, but we’re doing all we can to bring it to a parallel scale,” he added. “So, in theory, progress should be exponential.”
The FDA did not immediately respond to JEE News request for comment.
Musk said the first two human applications targeted by the Neuralink device will be in restoring vision and enabling muscle movement in people who cannot. “Even if someone has never seen sight, as they were born blind, we believe we can still restore sight,” he said.
The event was originally scheduled for October 31, but Musk postponed it a few days ago without giving a reason.
Neuralink’s last public offering, more than a year ago, involved a monkey with a brain chip that played computer games by thinking alone.
Musk, who also runs electric vehicle maker Tesla, rocket firm SpaceX, and social media platform Twitter, is known for lofty goals like colonizing Mars and saving humanity. His ambitions for Neuralink, which he launched in 2016, are on a similar scale.
He wants to develop a chip that would allow the brain to control complex electronic devices and eventually allow stroke victims to regain motor function and treat brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, dementia and Alzheimer’s. He also talks about merging the brain with artificial intelligence.
Neuralink, however, is running behind schedule. Musk said in a 2019 presentation that he wants to get regulatory approval by the end of 2020. He then said at a conference in late 2021 that he hoped to begin human trials that year.
Current and former employees have said Neuralink has repeatedly missed internal deadlines to get FDA approval to begin human trials. Reuters reported in August that Musk approached rival Synchron about a potential investment earlier this year after employees at Neuralink expressed frustration about their slow progress.
Synchron reached a major milestone in July by implanting its device in a patient in the United States for the first time. It received US regulatory clearance for human trials in 2021 and completed a study on four people in Australia.
