The American company co-founded by Elon Musk carried out the first brain implant on a patient in California.
Elon Musk revealed at the start of the week that the start-up Neuralink, of which he is co-founder, placed its very first brain implant on a patient on Sunday.
Located in Fremont (California), in the suburbs of San Francisco, Neuralink obtained the green light from the American Drug and Medical Devices Regulatory Agency, the FDA, in May. Its implant, the size of a coin, has already been placed in the brain of a macaque, which managed to play the video game “Pong” without a controller or keyboard. “The first results show promising neuronal activity,” Elon Musk wrote on X (ex-Twitter), about the implant on a patient.
Founded in 2016, Neuralink is not the first to install a brain implant in a human. Last September, the Dutch company Onward announced that it was testing the coupling of a brain implant with another that stimulates the spinal cord, with the aim of allowing a quadriplegic patient to regain mobility.
As early as 2019, researchers from the Grenoble Clinatec institute also presented an implant allowing, once installed, a quadriplegic person to animate an exoskeleton and move their arms or move around.