(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The brain implant industry has boomed over the past decade as companies such as Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience and Synchron have each aimed tens of millions of dollars toward developing tiny devices that send information directly from people’s brains to computers. While these startups have made remarkable progress, other companies and researchers still rely on less sophisticated technology rooted in academic and clinical settings.
Max Hodak, one of Neuralink Corp.’s founders, is trying to narrow that gap. His company, Alameda, California-based Science Corp., has several new products designed to bring down the cost and development time for research labs and startups looking to probe the mind. Hodak’s hope is that the tools will increase the pace of brain research, resulting in therapies for some of the most crippling conditions facing humans. “Our goal is to get the brain computer interface industry to be a hundred times bigger than it is now,” he says.
His strategy starts with Science’s probe technology, a set of chips and devices bundled under the Axon brand that connect into the brain tissue and make it possible to record and stimulate thousands of neurons at the same time. The probe system then works with a handheld computing device called SciFi that gathers and analyzes the data, as well as Science’s software, called Nexus, for running experiments across many probes at the same time.
The initial target audience is scientists doing fundamental research and those working with animals. Over time, Science plans to release a broader range of products, including some that are better suited for startups doing human studies. “These scientists are still really using tools from the 1980s,” says Hodak. “We’re going to get them to 2024 with these first products and keep refining the technology and then bring it to humans.”
Hodak did his first brain experiments in a Duke University dorm room, where he built a homemade contraption that could stimulate collections of mouse neurons. In 2016 he co-founded Neuralink, the brain implant startup backed by Elon Musk, and served as its president before leaving to start Science in 2021. Most of Science’s early work has centered on ocular implants that go underneath the retina to help restore vision in people with diseases like macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The company has clinical trials underway with that technology and still sees it as the heart of its business. Hodak, though, sensed an opportunity to take some of the products Science built for its own work and distribute them to others in the industry.
While scientists have been sticking electronic devices into animal and human brains for decades, they are still often building a lot of their own hardware and software from scratch. What common devices do exist are often based on dated technology that hasn’t followed the cost and performance curves typical of other electronics and computing fields. Several brain implant startups have leapt past some of these limitations in recent years through invention and large investments. Neuralink, for example, has created an implant that fits flush into a coin-size hole in a patient’s skull and communicates wirelessly, a major improvement over commonly used equipment requiring animals and people to have boxy devices affixed to their heads, tethered by wires to microwave-size data processing systems. These advances have allowed paralyzed patients to conduct business and play games online by moving cursors on computer screens with their thoughts. The implants can also translate neuronal signals into words, meaning that people suffering from conditions like ALS can simply think of what they’d like to say and have those thoughts pop up as a message on a computing device.
Hodak’s Science has tried to elevate the standard tools of brain science to the level of consumer electronics products. Its Axon probes have custom chips that make it possible for computers to interpret analog signals produced by the brain by turning them into digital signals; they can also handle much greater amounts of data than typical devices. The SciFi computing system, which looks like a palm-size smartphone, sucks in data from multiple probes, processes it and sends the information via Wi-Fi to computers.
The probes start at $500 each, and the SciFi unit costs $1,000. Together they’re less than a tenth the cost of typical equipment, according to Sumner Norman, the chief executive officer of Forest Neurotech LLC, which uses ultrasound to assess brain health. “Manufacturing a state-of-the-art probe and computing system at a reasonable cost is currently near impossible, especially under the budget of most labs and small startups,” Norman says. Hodak’s company “is attempting to change that.”
In addition to the hardware, Science hopes customers will use the Nexus software and a companion data protocol called Synapse to build applications instead of trying to write their own code. “I’ve written this software seven times in my life for different labs and companies,” says Hodak. “Instead of artisanal software written by grad students and postdocs, we wanted to ship modern, industrial-grade software that’s fast and that can scale to the hundreds of terabytes of data that’s needed with all these devices.”
Mackenzie Mathis, who runs a brain lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, spends a lot of time working with mice and is excited about the results she’ll get monitoring animals that can cruise around their cages without being tethered to computing systems. “Being able to record neural dynamics in freely moving animals will be game-changing,” she says. There are some existing wireless systems, Mathis adds, but they can record only “very few neurons at a time,” while Science can record hundreds.
Both Norman and Mathis caution that Science has much work ahead of it, such as persuading researchers to coalesce around the products and navigating the regulatory landscape. Norman expects that the products would appeal first to researchers who want to gather as much data as possible as quickly as possible, as opposed to a startup that would want to create its own proprietary hardware and software. He says Science’s products are unlikely to foster a Neuralink competitor in the near future. “If a startup wanted to develop this into a product for clinical use, there’s still a mountain of work to do,” he says.
Hodak admits that he’s questioned the business case around building these products. It was unclear that there was going to be a big enough industry to justify the burden and expense of trying to mass-produce the hardware. But over time, he says, he became convinced that brain research and technology is on the cusp of a new era, where Science can enable devices that help not only with conditions like paralysis and ALS but also mental health disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. “To be clear, I’m not saying that we have cures right now,” he says. “But I think this is going to be bigger than a lot of people think.”
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