Neuralink’s main competitor exploits the brain without surgery
Neuralink’s main competitor exploits the brain without surgery
By Tim Brinkhof | Published: 2024-12-21 16:00:00 | Source: The Future – Big Think
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
“Hello World!” Read one blurry tweet to publish On the Twitter account of Tom Oxley, founder and CEO of Synchron, a startup that develops brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in December 2021. The tweet was not written by Oxley but by one of Synchron’s patients, Philip O’Keefe. O’Keefe suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease that causes him to gradually lose control of his muscles. The BCI device, which was implanted nearly two years ago, allowed him to write the letter using his device mindPartially restoring his ability to communicate and interact with the world.
Hello World! Short tweet. Huge progress.
– Thomas Oxley (@tomoxl) December 23, 2021
When BCIs appear in popular media, they are often associated with Elon Musk Neuralink. But Synchron may be ahead of the game in some ways. The company was founded four years before its main competitor, in 2012, has received investments from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and has already launched two trials – one in Australia, the other in the US. The company’s main advantage over Neuralink, which received its first human patient earlier this year, is that its BCI devices do not require brain surgery. Neuralink implants its interfaces directly into the cerebral cortex, while Synchron implants its devices through the patient’s bloodstream, circumventing the cost and risks of physically penetrating the human skull.
In August 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration specific Synchron’s BCI is a cutting-edge device, with recognition for its potential to improve the treatment of debilitating or life-altering conditions, paving the way for clinical trials. So far, the results are promising. “There are 8 million people in the United States living with various forms of paralysis,” Ricky Banerjee, chief technology officer at Synchron, explained in a recent talk at Emtec 2024It is an annual conference on emerging technologies hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You lose the ability to control not only your interactions with others, but also your environment — whether that’s adjusting the thermostat or ensuring the security of the home. We see BCI as a way to restore that lost connection.”
In an interview with Freethink, Banerjee explains how Synchron’s BCI works, the technology that contributed to its design, and what it was able to do for those who agreed to let the company put its invention inside their bodies.
How Synchron’s BCI works
Before joining Synchron, Banerjee spent 15 years in neuromodulation research, which involves stimulating nerve activity through electrical and chemical stimuli. Neuromodulation and, by extension, brain-interface interfaces (BCIs) evolved from pacemaker technology dating back to the 1950s, a time when brain transplants were still the stuff of science fiction.
“This field has seen significant growth over the past five to 10 years,” she told Freethink over Zoom, with initial research focusing on mental disorders such as OCD, depression and insomnia before moving on to other conditions such as paralysis. “Neurotechnology is not just about the brain,” she explains. “It involves the entire nervous system, including peripheral nerves.”
“The skull attenuates brain waves. This is fortunate because we don’t want others to hear our thoughts, but it also complicates treatment.”
Ricky Banerjee
Synchron’s decision to develop a BCI that could be delivered intravenously began as a complication of brain surgery. “Accessing the brain is a complex and often highly specialized procedure,” Banerjee says. “There are only about 1,000 to 2000 Neurosurgeons who can perform these types of surgeries, which — although long approved for conditions like Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy — remain a barrier for many.
However, the company realized that for its BCI devices to work properly, it needed to find a way to get them into the brain: “It’s the skull that gets in the way. From a signal processing perspective, the skull attenuates the brainwaves. That’s fortunate because we don’t want others to hear our thoughts, but it also complicates treatment.”
Synchron’s BCI device is inserted through the jugular vein, which runs from the neck to the brain, using a catheter. Once the catheter is in the brain, it releases a self-expanding device made of nitinol, a biocompatible, corrosion-resistant nickel-titanium alloy that is typically used to expand arteries in surgical procedures. As Banerjee explained in her talk at EmTech, the implanted BCI device can detect certain brain waves and send them to a separate receiver, implanted in the chest. In patients with paralysis, the system can transmit their intended but unexecuted physical actions to an external device, such as a phone, TV remote, or Amazon Alexa, allowing them to use these devices without their voices or hands.
“Our devices are designed for chronic implantation, which means they stay in the body for years,” Banerjee tells Freethink. “In Australia, we have a patient whose implant has been in place for over four years at this point.” Banerjee says faulty implants can be repaired by updating their software externally. While the brain implant cannot be removed, because tissue grows around the device, the chest portion can be taken out and replaced.
Challenges and promises
Synchron’s BCI advantages are twofold. First and foremost, a non-surgical implant procedure not only makes the procedure easier, it also makes recovery easier, although some patients may recover more slowly due to pre-existing conditions. More importantly, perhaps, Synchron’s unique implant technology may also make it easier for the device to access different sections of the brain.
“If your goal is to recreate speech, most people think you should target the speech center,” Banerjee explains. “But research shows that speech also generates motor functions. So, instead of targeting the speech center, you can target the motor area, which is more easily accessible. By understanding how the mouth and tongue move during speech, you can recreate speech through motor signals. The brain is highly interconnected, so there are multiple ways to deal with challenges.”
Early trials of Synchron yielded positive results. The first, conducted by the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne in Australia, involved four human patients with acute paralysis and its conditions Main conclusion The implant was able to transmit nerve signals from the brain’s blood vessels over the long term without “serious adverse events.” 12 months Follow up He confirmed that the patients do not suffer from persistent neurological deficits, blood clots, or organ migration. Among other things, they were able to use their implants to send text messages, write emails, manage online banking, and most importantly – communicate their needs to their caregivers.
The second trial, conducted through Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, the Gates Vascular Institute at the University of Buffalo, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, along with Carnegie Mellon Engineering, included six patients with severe chronic upper extremity paralysis who had not responded to conventional treatment. Again, the study saw no device-related adverse events over the one-year evaluation period. What’s more, 100% of the implants were “accurately deployed,” according to the company’s report. press release“Targeted motor cortex coverage was achieved in all six patients.”
“Privacy concerns about mind reading are far from reality.”
Ricky Banerjee
Elad Levy, the study’s principal investigator and chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, referred to the trial as a “major clinical milestone,” adding, “This minimally invasive approach has the potential to launch BCI technology on a large scale for millions of patients with paralysis and other mobility challenges.”
News coverage of the trials has largely focused on how BCIs improve the lives of individual patients. Article from Wired He was followed by Mark, a 64-year-old with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, who received a BCI in August 2023. As the trials progressed, Synchron worked to make its implant compatible with many common electronic devices, including Alexa, which Mark can now control without using his voice. According to the article, Synchron was also able to connect Mark’s BCI interface to the Apple Vision Pro, a mixed reality headset that — after updates — allowed Mark to play video games like Solitaire by moving the cursor with his thoughts.
Looking forward
Although these experiments were promising, it is important to note that the time frame is too short, and the number of participants too small, to draw “firm conclusions,” as Banerjee herself said at EmTech. However, each new test allows Synchron to better understand the long-term challenges of brain implants and improve its devices accordingly.
In 2025, the company plans to launch its third trial – this time with a commercially available system. In addition to increasing the processing speeds of brain-interface interfaces (BCIs), Synchron hopes to use the implants to treat other conditions related to the brain and nervous system.
“The current system requires a chest-mounted device for power and communication, but our next system will be equipped with a rechargeable battery, improving ease of use. Patients will be able to use it at any time, even if they wake up in the middle of the night,” Banerjee says of the future.
Along the way, she hopes her work can change the negative attitudes and mistrust that many people have toward brain transplants. “The biggest misconception is that we read people’s minds directly,” she says. “In reality, we’re looking at small signals — like tapping your finger to click a mouse — simple on-and-off actions. We translate that into activity on a screen or computer. From a privacy standpoint, we’re not doing mind-reading. And that’s a long way off. In fact, we’re giving away more information using our phones, credit cards, and apps than we do with these implants. Privacy concerns about mind-reading are far from reality. Right now, it’s more like computer code than computer code.” mind reading.”
this condition Originally published by our sister site Freethink.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
