Science Corporation implants its vision-restoring chip in its first Stargardt disease patient

Science Corporation CEO Max Hodak announced that the company has implanted its vision-restoring chip, PRIMA, into its first patient with Stargardt disease, an inherited eye disease that gradually destroys central vision. Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, the brain implant company, explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt how the company’s work with PRIMA fits into its broader pursuit of a novel brain-computer interface (BCI).

“The retina is part of the central nervous system,” Hodak said on stage. “We consider cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, motor prostheses, these are all different types of BCIs.”

Hodak outlined a vision in which BCIs expand into a wide range of medical technology applications, rather than simply being a way to control computers.

While PRIMA is commercially available in Europe for patients who’ve lost their sight to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, the company believes its approach can be applied to multiple diseases, including Stargardt disease, which is currently considered incurable.

Stargardt disease affects the outer retina, causing the gradual death of the eye’s light-sensing cells while potentially sparing the inner retina, the part that passes visual signals onto the brain. It causes a central blind spot that gradually enlarges over time. Approximately 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision due to the disease.

“One of the nice things about this device approach, when I was saying the brain’s a computer, vision is electrical potential, like electrical activity down the optic nerve,” Hodak said. “That’s all vision is to the brain, and so if you can get the optic nerve to signal the the rest of the brain correctly, then you can provide vision to it.”

The company says its first patient with Stargardt disease received the PRIMA implant in May as part of its ongoing trial at the Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. During the patient’s first rehabilitation session, he saw a letter, and during the second, he was able to read a word.

To use the device, patients undergo an hour-long procedure that plants a small chip in the back of their eye, where the photoreceptors have degenerated. Then they wear camera-equipped glasses that transmit a view of the world to the chip. The implant essentially works like artificial photoreceptors.

“The device that this patient has is a two millimeter by two millimeter implant placed under the in the back of the eye, and so it’s like looking through a straw,” Hodak said. “It is not a big field of view color vision. It’s a patch in their central vision where . . .it’s black and white, but it is sharp. It’s high-contrast sharp, and so they can see a couple letters at a time. The next step is to make the field of view bigger. So to make a bigger implant, you have to deal with the curvature of the eye, and we need to make the electrodes smaller so that we get closer to native levels of detail.”

He continued, “I think we have a clear path. There’s a there’s a next ‘next generation’ that’s being worked on that’ll be in humans in the next year, and over the next five years, I think we’ll be able to get pretty close to native acuity.”

When Hodak founded Science Corporation in 2021 after leaving Neuralink, the company outlined plans to develop advanced neural engineering and brain-computer interface technology. But first, the company wants to prove its methods work and develop a sustainable business, which is why it’s working to restore vision with the visually impaired.

As for Science Corporation’s brain-computer interface technology, it has previously said that its sensor will be implanted inside the skull and rest on top of the brain, unlike a Neuralink device, which is inserted directly into brain tissue.

The company has said it believes the device could help address neurological conditions, such as possibly monitoring neurological activity in patients with brain tumors.

“In the near term, we’re going to be applying our first clinical indication, which hasn’t been announced publicly, is a neurodegenerative disease that everybody’s heard of,” Hodak said. “We’re also looking at stroke. For example, if you’ve lost part of your brain because it’s been dead due to stroke, if you can get connections into the deep brain in two different areas, you can imagine adding new cortical areas, just like adding new brain areas entirely — something simply not possible with conventional electrodes. But, I’d say longer term, the long-term mission of the company is to understand how the brain creates the mind and to learn to build engineered brains.”

Hodak went on to note that Science Corporation’s belief is that many people will eventually use some kind of BCI. While the company isn’t designing for “healthy 40-year-olds,” he said, it believes people will eventually need some kind of BCI by the age of 60 or 70.

“We want to figure out how do we extend not just lifespan but health span,” Hodak said.