Science Corporation recently announced the results of a clinical trial testing its brain implant’s ability to restore vision to the blind. The trial participants started with an average visual acuity of 20/450, way below the legal blindness threshold of 20/200, and wound up with an average of 20/160, reports Wired. As a result, the implant let a group of previously blind people read, recognize faces, play cards, and solve crossword puzzles. The implant is a brain-computer interface similar to Neuralink.
Wired reports:
Dubbed the Prima, the implant consists of a 2-mm square chip that is surgically placed under the retina, the backmost part of the eye, in an 80-minute procedure. A pair of glasses with a camera captures visual information and beams patterns of infrared light on the chip, which has 378 light-powered pixels. Acting like a tiny solar panel, the chip converts light to a pattern of electrical stimulation and sends those electrical pulses to the brain. The brain then interprets those signals as images, mimicking the process of natural vision.
There have been other attempts to restore vision by electrically stimulating the retina. Those devices have been able to produce spots of light called phosphenes in people’s field of sight—like blips on a radar screen. They’re enough to help people perceive people and objects as whitish dots, but it’s far from natural vision.
One of these, called the Argus II, was approved for commercial use in Europe in 2011 and in the US in 2013. That implant involved larger electrodes that were placed on top of the retina. Its manufacturer, Second Sight, stopped producing the device in 2020 due to financial difficulties. Neuralink and some others, meanwhile, are aiming to bypass the eye completely and stimulate the brain’s visual cortex instead.
[Company CEO Max] Hodak says the Prima differs from other retinal implants in its ability to provide “form vision,” or the perception of shapes, patterns, and other visual elements of objects. What users see isn’t “normal” vision though. For one, they don’t see in color. Rather, they see a processed image with a yellowish tint.
The trial enrolled people with geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, that causes gradual loss of central vision. People with the condition still have peripheral vision but have blind spots in their central vision, making it difficult to read, recognize faces, or see in low light.
This is just a preliminary clinical trial. This device won’t be available on the market for years, even if it is a huge medical advance.
Musk’s Neuralink is getting accelerated FDA review for its brain implant to cure blindness. But even this accelerated review will take years. The FDA can take many years to approve medical devices and drugs. The FDA didn’t approve a home test for HIV until 24 years after it first received an application. According to an FDA advisory committee, the test held “the potential to prevent the transmission of more than 4,000 new HIV infections in its first year of use alone.” That means thousands of people likely got infected with AIDS as a result of the delay in approving it. At least a hundred thousand people died waiting years for the FDA to approve beta blockers.
The FDA has approved an Alzheimer’s drug to slow brain damage caused by the disease, but it will cost taxpayers billions.
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Brain implants are also being used to restore cognitive abilities wiped out by traumatic brain injuries, enabling people to work again, and once again do things they couldn’t do because of their brain injury, such as reading, avoiding getting speeding tickets, and grocery shop.
Researchers have developed a technique for freezing and thawing brain tissue that doesn’t damage the tissue.
Surgeons in Houston report that they can use electrodes to stimulate brains without touching their surface.
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A Connecticut killer who ate a homeless man’s brain and eyes has been released early.
