Former Neuralink president Max Hodak unveils a new BCI startup that will not require patients to have holes drilled in their skulls.
This startup will rely on photonics to send light through patients' optic nerves to transfer information, rather than using implanting chips deep within the brain.
Neuralink's Co-Founder Funds A Competing $160 Million Startup
At the Elon Musk-owned Neuralink Corp., Hodak helped in the development of a computing device that can be inserted into a person's brain.
However, Hodak left the company last year, and the former Neuralink executive is now leading a brain company that goes against Neuralink with $160 million in total funding.
According to Gizmodo, Hodak's brain-computer interface company called Science Corp might have an advantage over Neuralink since it will not have to get near the test subject's head with a drill.
The Science Corp. leader believes that using photonics instead of microchips to transmit information to the optic nerve could yield similar types of results through less invasive ways.
The rivaling companies both believe that the procedures they pursue can help treat patients with extreme disabilities, and can enhance human cognition and computation abilities in the future.
At the moment, Science Corp. has already developed a prototype device called "Science Eye," which is capable of treating vision loss as per tests on rabbits.
The prototype uses a 2-millimeter-wide thin LED film, which is implanted on top of a rabbit's retina to process patterns sent to it wirelessly.
According to Bloomberg, this machine intends to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a disease affecting peripheral vision, and macular degeneration, which affects central vision.
"We're starting in very disabled patient populations with serious unmet needs, but if you refine that technology... you get to replace glasses and goggles with just the tiny little implant in the eye," Hodak says.
The former Neuralink president says that he would like to begin testing on humans in the following years, but that might be easier said than done considering Neuralink's history with the FDA.
Read More: Elon Musk Announces Neuralink's Show-and-Tell Event Has Been Delayed
Science Corp. Explains How Science Eye Functions
According to Hodak, the LED film on the Science Eye processes patterns from the glasses embedded with tiny cameras to turn images into a form that optic nerves can read.
For it to function, the optic nerve must be light sensitive, which can only be achieved through gene therapy where an engineered protein injected into the optic nerve alters it.
By targeting individual cells, Science Corp. claims that it can achieve a higher resolution as compared to other cutting-edge ways to treat blindness or eye diseases.
Hodak says that their technology will eventually let users read and write from the brain at the same time, but the preliminary intention is to focus on the writing part.
At the moment, this technology remains unproven on humans, but it is being expedited to solve a major flaw in existing brain-computer interfaces, Bloomberg reports.
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