Key takeaways
- Neuralink is looking for human candidates to test its brain chip implants
- The company received FDA approval for human trials in May
- Neuralink isn’t publicly traded, but its latest funding round raised $280 million from the likes of Peter Thiel’s fund
Are the days of Terminator nearly upon us? Neuralink, Elon Musk’s human brain chip implant company, has started recruitment for human clinical trials after the business received FDA approval earlier this year in a landmark decision to make brain implants a reality.
The sci-fi-sounding company has some serious potential in the healthcare industry and marks a new frontier for the sector with brain implants, but there are still competitors out there for Neuralink to be worried about. In the meantime, though, the company’s valuation has shot up.
Here’s everything we know about the Neuralink human trials and what Elon Musk’s company’s future is looking like.
What is Neuralink?
Neuralink is Elon Musk’s brain chip implant company. As in, literally putting computer chips inside of human brains. Why? The goal is to help serious medical concerns like paralysis, blindness and neurogenerative disorders first. That’s right – Neuralink aims to help people walk and see again. After that, the broader goal is to help widespread global issues like mental health and obesity.
Should it be approved, there isn’t a limit on what Musk has planned for the revolutionary technology. As for how it works, the brain-computer interfaces “are systems that decode intended movement signals from brain activity to control external devices such as computers,” according to the Neuralink study brochure.
Neuralink received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this year after initially being rejected in early 2022 over concerns about the brain-computer interfaces’ lithium batteries and whether the implants can safely be removed without damaging brain tissue.
Who is Neuralink looking to recruit?
Fancy having a chip implant plugged into your brain? That could be the reality should Elon Musk’s Neuralink trials go well. The company is officially looking for the first human to become what arguably is the first cyborg after receiving approval from the FDA and the hospital undertaking the medical procedure.
Neuralink is looking for patients with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to test out the experimental device, the company confirmed in a blog post.
The PRIME study, which involves directly planting a wireless brain-computer interface into the test subject’s brain, will take place over the next six years. The first 18 months of the study will be dedicated to at-home and clinical trials, with five years of follow-up appointments.
As well as testing the technology itself, the trial will also assess the safety of the Neuralink implant, the surgical robot completing the procedure and the overall functionality of the brain-computer interface with its intended purpose: “to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.”
The trial “represents an important step in our mission to create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs”, Neuralink said, but even if the study were successful, it would still take years for the chips to be ready for the masses.
Has there been any other development in the field?
Neuralink has one key competitor that beat Musk’s project to the line with FDA approval. Synchron enrolled its first patient in a U.S. clinical trial last May, with the early feasibility study funded by the National Institutes of Health to evaluate the product’s safety. The trial is set to include six patients in total.
Synchron’s brain-machine interface works differently from Neuralink’s in that the device travels to the brain through blood vessels once implanted, whereas Neuralink plans to insert the device directly into the patient’s skull. The idea is that the ‘Stentrode’ then translates brain activity into everyday tasks like texting, emailing and online shopping, which could be a game changer for paralyzed individuals.
There’s no denying Neuralink is the more prominent company: at the end of 2022, Synchron raised $75 million in its latest funding round, whereas Neuralink’s latest funding round was nearly four times that. But it certainly beat Neuralink to the punch and is over a year ahead at this point. And Synchron has some pretty big backers behind it: Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were among some of the investors for its latest funding round.
That might be why rumors sprang up last year that Musk had approached Synchron about a potential investment in the company. The whispers were quickly shot down, though there’s no saying it can’t happen in the future.
The controversies around the company
Just because Neuralink received FDA approval doesn’t mean the project hasn’t come without criticism. Concerns around animal welfare have landed Neuralink in hot water several times in recent years, including a monkey death as part of testing in 2022 as part of an unsuccessful trial to get the animal to play Pong with the chip insert.
In a Reuters article from December 2022, anonymous Neuralink employees accused the company of unnecessary animal suffering and deaths due to Musk’s relentless push towards getting the project past FDA approval. The issues are apparently so bad that the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a federal probe at the end of last year into Neuralink for violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
Working at Neuralink also sounds pretty stressful if Elon’s timescales are anything to go by. Alongside the alleged animal welfare violations, the article also states Musk told employees he would trigger a “market failure” at the company unless Neuralink employees made progress.
What does it mean for investors?
Neuralink isn’t publicly traded, but it isn’t hard to imagine that it could happen one day in the future if the human trials succeed. For now, though, investors can only focus on the company’s growth – and the figures are off the charts.
Last month, Neuralink’s latest funding round raised $280 million. The round was led by Founders Fund, a venture capital fund backed by Peter Thiel, Musk’s former co-founder at PayPal. The company didn’t elaborate on the valuation on which the funds were raised.
We do have some idea already of Neuralink’s value. In the summer, it was reported that Neuralink was worth over $5 billion once news of the FDA approval had spread. The market cap is based on privately executed stock trades carried out by existing shareholders like employees and early backers rather than new investors.
The bottom line
It’s exciting times for Neuralink, despite the many controversies the company faces over the speed at which it’s rocketed forwards at to get to the point of human trials. Given the size of its latest funding round, it’s clear Neuralink’s backers think the idea has foundations to grow a new area of science.
Neuralink and its competitor Synchron have the potential to completely change the world. It’s that science fiction-level of wondrous thinking that means VCs and angel investors want to pile in so they can get in at the ground level. Unfortunately, it’s going to take years or even decades to know if either company has a viable product.
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