Neuralink – the neurotechnology company owned by Elon Musk – has successfully implanted a wireless brain chip into a person, according to the billionaire.
Posting on X (formerly Twitter) – which he also owns – Musk said that “promising” activity in the brain had been found and the patient was “recovering well.”
Musk added that “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”
He added that Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy. “Enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” he wrote on X. “Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.”
But this development isn’t a world first. Several other companies have already successfully implanted similar devices into patient brains. For instance, the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, put electronic implants onto the brain and spine of a paralyzed man, which has enabled him to walk again by sending his thoughts through the implants to his legs and feet. The results were published in the scientific journal Nature last year.
However, it is a significant breakthrough for Neuralink, if the case is as Musk suggests on X. The company’s website has not posted any updates on a patient being implanted – the most recent post comes from September 2023, at the time of writing – so his claims cannot yet be verified, although the company did repost his X post.
Neuralink is based in California in the USA and the company began recruiting for its first-in-human clinical trial, the PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) in September last year. The company said PRIME is “a groundbreaking investigational medical device trial for our fully-implantable, wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) – aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.”
