Science Corporation reports that its first patient with Stargardt disease received a PRIMA implant in May. During his initial rehabilitation session, he saw a letter; in the next session, he read a word. The early results do not show that PRIMA can yet restore useful vision for people with Stargardt disease.
The implant was placed during the company’s ongoing trial at Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. Stargardt disease affects the outer retina, gradually destroying its light-sensing cells while potentially sparing the inner retina, which relays visual signals to the brain. The disease causes a central blind spot that expands over time. Around 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision because of Stargardt disease, which is currently considered incurable.
In Europe, PRIMA is commercially available for people who have lost sight due to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. Science Corporation thinks the same approach may apply to several diseases, including Stargardt disease, although its use for Stargardt is still exploratory.
The procedure takes about an hour. A small chip is placed at the back of the eye, where the photoreceptors have degenerated. Patients then wear glasses fitted with a camera, which sends an image of the world to the implant. The chip functions like artificial photoreceptors.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, CEO Max Hodak described the Stargardt project as part of a broader approach to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). “The retina is part of the central nervous system,” he said. “We consider cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, motor prostheses, these are all different types of BCIs.” In Hodak’s view, BCIs could serve a broad range of medical uses, rather than only controlling computers.
Hodak said the implant measures two millimeters by two millimeters and gives the patient a small area of central vision. “The device that this patient has is a two millimeter by two millimeter implant placed under the in the back of the eye, and so it’s like looking through a straw,” he said. “It is not a big field of view color vision. It’s a patch in their central vision where . . .it’s black and white, but it is sharp. It’s high-contrast sharp, and so they can see a couple letters at a time. The next step is to make the field of view bigger. So to make a bigger implant, you have to deal with the curvature of the eye, and we need to make the electrodes smaller so that we get closer to native levels of detail.”
The company is developing a next-generation device that Hodak expects to test in humans within the next year. “I think we have a clear path. There’s a there’s a next ‘next generation’ that’s being worked on that’ll be in humans in the next year, and over the next five years, I think we’ll be able to get pretty close to native acuity.” This is Hodak’s projection. So far, the reported rehabilitation results are limited to seeing a letter and reading a word.
Hodak previously served as president and co-founder of Neuralink, the brain-implant company. After leaving Neuralink, he established Science Corporation in 2021, with plans to develop advanced neural engineering and BCI technology. The company is focusing first on restoring vision as it tests its methods and works toward building a sustainable business.
Science Corporation has outlined a different design for its other BCI. Its sensor would be placed inside the skull, resting on top of the brain, rather than inserted into brain tissue like a Neuralink device. The company says the technology could help with neurological conditions, potentially by monitoring brain activity in people with brain tumors.
Hodak said the company has not announced its first clinical indication for the technology. He described it as a neurodegenerative disease “that everybody’s heard of.” He also spoke about stroke: if a stroke has killed part of the brain, connections to two areas of the deep brain could potentially add new cortical areas, he said, which conventional electrodes cannot do. The company’s longer-term goal, he added, is to understand how the brain creates the mind and learn to build engineered brains.
Hodak said Science Corporation expects that many people may eventually use some form of BCI. The company is not designing for “healthy 40-year-olds,” he said, but thinks people may need a BCI by age 60 or 70. “We want to figure out how do we extend not just lifespan but health span,” he said.
