Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink to begin human trials

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink revealed Tuesday that it will begin testing its medical device in human trials.

The company announced that the human trials will be used to evaluate the safety of its “fully implantable, wireless brain-computer interface.” It will test the effectiveness and safeness of the company’s implant and surgical robot, which aims to enable “people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.”

Musk, who also owns X and Tesla, wrote that the first patient “will soon receive a Neuralink device.”

“This ultimately has the potential to restore full body movement,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk civilizational risk reduction by improving human to AI (and human to human) bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had had this.”

Neuralink has dubbed its trial as the Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface Study. According to the announcement, the surgical robot will surgically place the implant’s threads in a part of the brain that controls movement intention. Once placed, the implant is supposed to transmit brain signals to a smartphone app that will decode the intention of the movement. 

Eventually, the goal of the brain implant startup is to allow those with paralysis to use a keyboard or control a computer with just their thoughts. The company said that the trial was awarded the investigational device exemption by the Food and Drug Administration in May.

The study is calling on those who have quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), are at least 22 years old and have a reliable caregiver to apply for the trial, which will take place over six years in total.