Neuralink competitor launches platform to speed up medical innovation

Biotechnology startup and Neuralink competitor Science on Monday launched a latest platform that goals to make it easier for other firms to quickly develop and produce medical devices. 

The platform, called Science Foundry, allows firms to utilize and construct upon Science’s internal infrastructure by offering access to greater than 80 of its tools and services, like the corporate’s thin-film electrode technologies.

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The price of the technology required to develop medical devices is usually “prohibitive” for early-stage startups, Science Co-Founder and CEO Max Hodak told CNBC in an interview. Individual tools can cost anywhere from $200,000 to $2 million, and Hodak said firms could easily spend a whole lot of hundreds of thousands constructing a producing line. 

For a lot of startups, that cost is just too much to bear, but Hodak is hoping Science Foundry will help.

“Hopefully, we bring down the barriers to innovation,” Hodak said. “There is a bunch of smart people on the market which have a bunch of various ideas than those that we’ve, and we would love to enable them.” 

Science is a component of the growing brain-computer interface, or BCI, industry. A BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. Perhaps the best-known name within the space is Neuralink, because of the high profile of founder Elon Musk, who can also be the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

Hodak co-founded Neuralink and served as the corporate’s president until he announced his departure in 2021. At Neuralink, Hodak helped develop a BCI system that’s designed to be implanted directly into the brain, but at Science, he’s working on an implant that does not directly touch the brain in any respect.

Science’s flagship BCI system is the Science Eye– a visible prosthesis that goals to assist patients with two forms of great blindness restore some visual input to their brains. 

The Science Eye relies on a skinny, flexible micro-LED array that’s surgically implanted over the retina. The implant controls a bunch of light-sensitive cells within the optic nerve that Science alters through a type of optogenetic gene therapy. When one pixel is turned on within the array, a cell is turned on within the optic nerve, which might be used to drive the nerve and send vision into the brain. 

Science’s implant is powered by special glasses which can be outfitted with tiny sensors and cameras. The LED array translates the pictures it receives from the glasses and sends them as much as the optic nerve. 

Hodak said the resulting images will look different than what individuals with healthy eyes are used to – at the very least for the primary iteration of the technology – but that it’s going to be very restorative for patients with no light sensitivity. Eventually, he said thinks Science will give you the option to breed high-resolution color vision. 

Science has been testing the technology in rabbits, and Hodak said the corporate hopes to eventually conduct trials with human patients as soon as next yr.

The corporate’s latest platform Science Foundry goals to support firms working on similarly ambitious ideas. Hodak said he expects to see demand from other neurotechnology firms, but that other medical technology startups and even quantum computing firms represent growth opportunities. 

The price of using Science Foundry is comparable to the associated fee of working with academic facilities, that are “low cost to start,” Hodak said. But while academic facilities typically don’t allow firms to check devices on patients or sell them available on the market, Hodak said it’s going to be easier for Science Foundry customers to commercialize their products.

Hodak said the platform will profit Science and the broader industry as an entire.

“This permits us to afford larger-scale and more capabilities that then we will use to enable the community and ourselves even further,” he said.