* Text/Spades with long sword
Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, has long been a fanatical advocate of human clinical trials, and from 2020 to the present, the tech moguel and the world's richest man has mentioned the news of the company's human trials more than once. The reality, though, is that Neuralink and Musk's dreams are still far away, and one of their competitors, Synchron, has recently preemptively started a human clinical trial called "COMMAND."
Yesterday, Synchron announced that they had recruited their first volunteers for the "COMMAND" program, and the trial would be conducted at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. While the company did not elaborate on the volunteer's circumstances, the "COMMAND" trial was set up for severely paralyzed patients, and based on that, the volunteers' situation does not seem to be difficult to guess.
Last July, Synchron received regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), becoming the only company in the world to receive a "permanent implant BCI clinical trial license" — an honor Musk's dream.
Judging from the published news, Synchron's research direction is also implantable brain-computer interface, but unlike Musk's Neuralink, Synchron's scheme "Stentrode" does not need to punch holes in the skull, but implants electrodes into the brain through venous blood vessels. After the electrode enters the brain from the jugular vein, after 14 days of cell growth, it will merge with the blood vessel wall of the brain.
In layman's terms, Synchron's brain-computer interface is more like a well-established cardiac stent solution.
With the help of the system, the current generated by the patient's brain is drawn out of electrodes at the chest through wires and then connected to the signal processing device. In this step, Synchron's self-developed BrainOS operating system decodes the signal read by the sensor and converts it into a general-purpose signal. Ultimately, users can control electronic devices, such as computers, with only eyeballs and ideas.
Synchron had previously experimented with the program on four volunteers, and the results were pretty good — Stentrode was well-secured on them, using the device at home, and the volunteers were able to keep the device running safely without supervision.
Philip O'Keefe, a 62-year-old alzheimer's patient, for example, has deteriorated to the point where he barely can use a mouse, but after implant surgery and initial training, he can easily send emails, shopping, etc. with the help of his eyeballs, and last December, he also sent a message titled "Hello World" on the Twitter account of the CEO of Syncron!" Tweets.
"This system is surprising, it takes practice like learning to ride a bike, but once you start rolling, it becomes natural." O'Keefe described his feelings this way in a statement.
Synchron is currently planning to further enhance Stentrode, where they think brain signal sensors should be arranged through blood vessels in all corners of the brain so that more signals and instructions can be read and help people with disabilities perform more complex operations.
While Synchron steadily advanced its plans, other brain-computer interface companies were also making improvements to their own neural implants. Among them, the most eye-catching is undoubtedly Neuralink, which is inseparable from Musk's all-time "carrying goods" behavior on social media.
According to a promotional video released by Neuralink in 2021, the brain implant developed by the company consists of a "small ball" containing electronic devices and flexible electrodes, with a width of about 50 μm, a thickness of 5 μm, and a length of about 20 mm. Once implanted, electrodes will read brain activity through sensing or stimulating neurons, and can even theoretically "write" brain activity.
Unable to conduct human trials, Neuralink's previous experiment was done on monkeys, and after the chip was implanted, they tried to get a monkey to play games through it. From the publicly available experimental video, when the monkey uses the joystick, the chip records its brain activity and sends the data back to the computer to analyze the correspondence between its movements and brain activity. After that, the computer will disable the joystick, and although the monkey is still accustomed to playing with the joystick, it is its brain that actually controls the game.
Musk believes that this program can help patients control prosthetic limbs, because its principle is "no different" from monkey playing games.
Of course, the disadvantages of this approach are also obvious, as mentioned above, Neuralink brain-computer implants require craniotomy on patients, removing a coin-sized skull, implanting a chip into the brain, and then using specialized surgical equipment to sew the sensor to the surface of the cerebral cortex – and all of this must be done carefully to avoid the patient's blood vessels.
Neuralink has always guaranteed the safety of surgery, but no one knows whether such a "rough" implantation method will cause infection and even irreversible damage to the brain. Perhaps because of this, the FDA has been slow to approve Neuralink's human clinical trial request. For now, at least, Neuralink can only prey on monkeys — and after allegations that Neuralink "abused" experimental monkeys, how long such an experiment can be done will need to be marked with a question mark.
It's important to note that this isn't just a risk for Neuralink, but a problem for many brain-computer interface companies, including Synchron. With the prolongation of time, any electrode that enters human tissue may cause inflammation, and whether it can develop materials that can be implanted in the human brain for a long time without self-deterioration or infection is a problem that future brain-computer interface companies need to overcome.
On the other hand, how to avoid the moral and ethical problems of brain-computer interfaces also requires the attention of technology companies. As mentioned above, schemes such as Neuralink can theoretically affect some of the patient's brain activity; in addition, the patient's raw brain data, that is, ideas, should these privacy that should not be known to anyone be leaked in the era of brain-computer interfaces? Problems are still hovering over this young technological field.
*Image courtesy of Yandex