A man in Sydney who had been losing the centre of his vision to an inherited eye disease has read a word again, with the help of a chip no bigger than a grain of rice. Science Corporation, the neurotechnology company founded by former Neuralink president Max Hodak, says it has fitted its PRIMA implant in the first patient with Stargardt disease, a condition that has no approved cure.
Stargardt disease slowly kills the light-sensing cells in the outer retina. The layers behind them, which pass signals on to the brain, can stay largely intact, and that is exactly the gap PRIMA is designed to bridge. During a surgical procedure of about an hour, a chip measuring two by two millimetres is placed at the back of the eye where the photoreceptors have died. The patient then wears glasses with a built-in camera that beams the scene onto the implant, which stimulates the remaining retinal cells much like natural photoreceptors would.
The operation took place in May as part of a trial at Sydney Eye Hospital. According to the company, the patient recognised a single letter in his first rehabilitation session and managed a whole word in the second. Hodak, speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this week, was frank about the limits: the picture is black and white and only covers a small patch, a bit like looking through a straw, but it is sharp and high in contrast.
PRIMA is already sold in Europe for people with geographic atrophy, a late form of age-related macular degeneration. Around 150,000 people worldwide have lost sight to Stargardt disease, so extending the device to them would be a meaningful step. Hodak says a next-generation implant with a wider field of view and smaller electrodes should reach human trials within a year, and he expects vision close to natural sharpness within five years.
For Science Corporation, the eye is the first stop. The company treats the retina as part of the brain and sees implants like this as an early, practical kind of brain-computer interface.
