After the firm missed prior deadlines he had set, Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he expects a wireless brain chip built by his company Neuralink to start human clinical testing in six months.
The business is working on brain chip interfaces that, according to its claims, might let crippled people move and communicate once again. Musk said on Wednesday that the program would also focus on recovering eyesight.
Neuralink, a company with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, has recently been testing its products on animals while waiting for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give the go-ahead for human clinical trials.
Musk said at a long-awaited public update on the gadget, “We want to be really meticulous and ensure that it will function properly before putting a device inside a person.”
Musk underlined the pace at which the business is creating its gadget during a nearly three-hour presentation to a restricted group of invitees at Neuralink’s headquarters.
“The development at first may appear possibly agonizingly slow, especially as it relates to people, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in tandem,” he said. Therefore, advancement ought to be exponential in theory.
Reuters’ request for comment from the FDA was not immediately met with a response.
According to Musk, the Neuralink device’s first two human uses would be to restore eyesight and allow those who are unable to move their muscles to do so. “We think we can still restore eyesight,” he stated, “even if someone has never had vision, ever, like they were born blind.”
Musk canceled the event two days before it was scheduled for October 31 without providing a reason.
More than a year ago, Neuralink showed a monkey with a brain chip using just its thoughts to play a computer game.
Musk, who also owns the electric car company Tesla, the rocket company SpaceX, and the social networking site Twitter, is renowned for his aspirational plans to colonize Mars and save mankind. The same lofty goals are held for Neuralink, which he founded in 2016.
He wants to create a chip that would enable the brain to control intricate electronic devices, eventually restoring motor function to paralyzed people and treating diseases of the brain like Parkinson’s, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. He also discusses combining artificial intelligence and the brain.
However, Neuralink is running behind schedule. In a 2019 presentation, Musk stated that his goal was to win regulatory approval by the end of 2020. Then, in late 2021, he declared at a conference that he hoped to begin human trials this year.
Current and former employees claim that Neuralink has repeatedly missed internal deadlines for obtaining FDA approval to begin human trials. According to Reuters, Musk approached rival Synchron earlier this year about a potential investment after complaining to Neuralink staff members about their sluggish progress.
By successfully implanting its device in a patient in the United States for the first time in July, Synchron achieved a significant milestone. In 2021, it received regulatory approval from the US for use in human trials, and studies involving four Australians have been completed.
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