“European regulators have approved Science Corporation’s PRIMA retinal implant, which combines a tiny chip inserted beneath the retina with camera-equipped glasses to restore functional vision,” reports The Doomslayer.
TechCrunch adds:
Science Corporation, a startup developing novel brain-computer interfaces (BCI), won approval from Europe’s medical device regulator to begin selling a device that restores vision lost from age-related macular degeneration.
The company said the device, called PRIMA, also received a designation from the US Food and Drug Administration that is the first step toward an expedited regulatory review, which could see the device used to treat two rare kinds of blindness.
Millions of people around the world suffer from age-related macular degeneration, which destroys the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eyes, making it difficult to read and recognize faces.
To use the device, patients suffering from this loss of vision undergo an hour-long outpatient procedure that plants a small chip in back of their eye. Then they wear camera-equipped glasses that transmit a view of the world to the chip.
In other good news, Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in a victim’s skin.
A Latin American country has eliminated trachoma, an infectious disease that sometimes leads to blindness.
Australia also recently eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. Previously, it had afflicted some aboriginal Australian communities.
Burundi is in Africa, and is the second poorest country on Earth. It experiences ethnic massacres from time to time, such as when its government killed between 100,000 and 300,000 members of the Hutu ethnic group in 1972. But Burundi still managed to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem, last year.
“According to the World Health Organization, the number of people at risk of contracting trachoma, a bacterial eye infection, fell to 97 million in late 2025, down from 1.5 billion in 2002.”
