Science Corporation implants its vision-restoring chip in its first Stargardt disease patient

The company has said it believes the device could help address neurological conditions, such as possibly monitoring neurological activity in patients with brain tumors.

“In the near term, we’re going to be applying our first clinical indication, which hasn’t been announced publicly, is a neurodegenerative disease that everybody’s heard of,” Hodak said. “We’re also looking at stroke. For example, if you’ve lost part of your brain because it’s been dead due to stroke, if you can get connections into the deep brain in two different areas, you can imagine adding new cortical areas, just like adding new brain areas entirely — something simply not possible with conventional electrodes. But, I’d say longer term, the long-term mission of the company is to understand how the brain creates the mind and to learn to build engineered brains.”

Hodak went on to note that Science Corporation’s belief is that many people will eventually use some kind of BCI. While the company isn’t designing for “healthy 40-year-olds,” he said, it believes people will eventually need some kind of BCI by the age of 60 or 70.

“We want to figure out how do we extend not just lifespan but health span,” Hodak said.