Neuralink's Rival Tests Brain Chip in Race to Bring Implants to Market | WSJ

- So we're gonna start the experiment, okay. - [Narrator] That experiment you're seeing now is something only a handful of people have experienced. Having a microchip read your mind from inside your head. It's part of a growing industry that includes, Elon Musk's, Neuralink, which says it just implanted its first chip into a human brain, but other devices have already proven to telepathically control computers and wirelessly operate prosthetics. - It's a fundamentally different class of medical

device than anything we've ever seen before. - [Narrator] Here's an inside look at how two of the implants challenging Neuralink work and what it will take to get them to consumers. - Elon musk is the kind of person who has very, very expansive visions of the future. His idea is we're actually gonna augment perfectly healthy humans with this chip so that we can go along for the ride with AI as it advances. - It's gonna be important for us to figure out how we coexist with advanced artificial int

elligence. - [Narrator] While Elon Musk's end goal for Neuralink is wider reaching, it's starting with addressing a specific medical condition, which other leading implantable BCIS or brain computer interfaces are also aiming to treat. - The technology is for people who can no longer use their smartphones. It's people whose hands don't work. So it's things like stroke. ALS, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, severe arthritis, cerebral palsy. - [Narrator] These implants right now don't cure

these issues, but they could allow someone who has lost use of their hands to say, move a computer mouse. Just by thinking. - Our patients describe feeling a little bit like they're locked in their own body, their brain still working and they want to do things, but you depend on other people to engage. So it sort of gets to like a restoration of agency autonomy. - Tom Oxley is a CEO of Synchron, one of the five leading BCIs that are competing in the industry. While they vary in several ways, the

re's one major difference that sets them apart. Invasiveness, or how deeply implanted they are in the brain. - Where neurotechnology has been developing is to try to make devices that are less invasive, but also devices that work better, devices that can get more information in and out. Devices that can target specific regions of the brain - Neuralink device and others like it have to be implanted directly into or onto the brain in order to gather more data. Synchron, on the other hand, is a ste

nt that is implanted into a blood vessel in the surface of the brain. It's less risky than brain surgery, but the placement can affect what information the implant gets from the brain. - There's a whole bunch of different ideas for what's gonna give you the best brain signal readings and from that data, can we do more? But then there's a trade off with invasiveness, and so you have all these companies doing slightly different things, hoping to come up with sort of the the best recipe. - [Narrato

r] Here's how Synchrons device works. - So I have a stent road here, which is the electrode array that goes into the brain, so I'll just bring it out of the catheter. So you can see it opened up outside of the catheter here, so we should see it coming up in a minute. If you look down here, you'll see something coming up inside the brain now. - That stent road, as Synchro calls, their device is a number of electrodes that pick up electrical signals that correspond with specific thoughts. Those si

gnals run down into this chip, which is implanted in the chest. It wirelessly sends the signals to a computer that transforms them into a digital command, like a mouse click. - So where your brain previously made your hand move, like mine is doing right now, it now is pushing a cursor to do navigate and click on a screen. - [Narrator] Synchro has successfully put permanent implants in 10 patients so far as part of its clinical trials. - You can, sometimes you can feel it. Same as a pacemaker. -

[Narrator] Precision, whose implant you saw in the surgery earlier is testing a temporary version of its device. The company is using volunteers who are already scheduled for other brain operations to implant its electrode array to collect data and then remove it at the end of the surgery. Right now, the device is recording brain activity as the patient goes through the motions of rock paper, scissors. - Patients in this study are wearing a glove on each hand that allows us to track the movement

of the hand in real time with a very, very high sensitivity so that we know exactly what each finger is doing and where the fingers in the hand and the arm are in space, and we can correlate that with the electrical activity that is happening on the motor cortex just before and during and after the execution of a movement. - [Narrator] That data is projected onto this grid, which is like a map of the brain. These red areas are where more activity is happening with each action. This helps resear

chers understand how the brain activates different movements, and they can later use that data to help paralyzed patients control a computer with their minds, for example. - We can predict what's about to happen even before the patient speaks or moves. - In terms of invasiveness, Precision's, electrode array is meant to slide in through a slit in the skull to sit just on top of the brain. In order to make it to market. These devices will have to prove to the FDA that they're both safe and worth

the risk, and then they'll still need to get buy-in from other players throughout the industry. - We have to think about the insurance providers. We have to think about the hospitals. We have to think about the physicians who are prescribing the devices. All of these people have to get together and agree that this is the best path forward. It's something that they want and they recognize the benefit of it. - [Narrator] That process could take years, but some experts think that they could start h

itting the market sometime in the next decade. While Musk's vision of putting chips into healthy brains is likely much further away than that, the uses for BCIS have the potential to expand in that time too. Motif Neurotech, for instance, is working on minimally invasive BCI technology that could help treat mental health disorders like depression. - Where I see the future is a company maybe Neuralink or Parapalegic that focus on high bandwidth. There's gonna be companies like Synchron and Motif

that focus on minimal invasiveness. Naturally, those customers are gonna start to look different. At that point, I think there's gonna be more competition between these companies as they start to establish who is the number one person in Neurotech. But right now, I think there's room for all of us to try to find a space. (soft music)