After years of research, the billionaire has just announced that his company Neuralink had successfully installed a brain implant in his first human patient.
- After years of experiments, billionaire Elon Musk has just announced that his start-up Neuralink had placed its first brain implant on a human patient. It is not the first company in the sector to accomplish such a feat.
- This implant, also called a brain-machine interface, should “allow you to control your phone or your computer, and through them, almost any device, simply by thinking”. According to Musk, “the first users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.”
- The start-up says it wants to restore movement to paralyzed patients, but also sight to the blind and even cure psychiatric illnesses such as depression.
“The first results show promising neuronal activity”, wrote Elon Musk on X. The billionaire has just announced that his start-up Neuralink, of which he is co-founder, had placed its first brain implant on a human patient, who “recovering well”.
Elon Musk clarifies that this implant, also called brain-machine interface, must “allowing you to control your phone or computer, and through them, almost any device, simply by thinking.” According to him, “The first users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.”
An implant allowing quadriplegic patients to move through thought
After a journey strewn with pitfalls, the company Neuralink, located in Fremont, in the suburbs of San Francisco (California), finally obtained the green light last May from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American regulatory agency for drugs and medical devices. Its implant, the size of a coin, has already been placed in the brain of a macaque, which managed to play the video game “Pong” without a controller or keyboard.
Founded in 2016, Neuralink is not the first company in the sector to accomplish this feat. Last September, the Dutch company Onward tested the coupling of a brain implant with another that stimulates the spinal cord, in order to allow a quadriplegic patient to regain mobility. As early as 2019, researchers from the Grenoble Clinatec institute presented an implant allowing a quadriplegic person to animate an exoskeleton and move their arms or move around.
Give sight to the blind and cure psychiatric illnesses?
The start-up, which recently raised some $323 million in investments, says it also wants to restore movement to paralyzed patients, but also sight to the blind and even cure psychiatric illnesses such as depression. Ultimately, Elon Musk also aims to offer his implant to everyone, in order to allow better communication with computers and to contain, according to him, the “risk for our civilization” that artificial intelligence poses.
