Elon Musk’s Neuralink to implant BCI in 2nd patient in about a week, looks to solve hardware issues

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is planning to implant its brain chip in a second human being. This was revealed by top executives of Neuralink including Musk during a livestream on X. Neuralink aims to implant its chip in a second human patient within “the next week or so”. The execs revealed that they are working on hardware problems that they encountered with the chip in the first trial.

Notably, the company began its first human trial on an Arizona-based 29-year-old, Noland Arbaugh, earlier this year. Arbaugh was left paralysed from his shoulder down back in 2016 due to an accident.

As per the official website, the first brain-computer interface or BCI by Neuralink called Telepathy comes with 64 threads that are inserted directly into the brain. These threads are thinner than human hair and are designed to record neural signals through 1,024 electrodes.

For the unversed, Neuralink is the first BCI company to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to commercialise their devices.

During the livestream, Musk stated that the company is planning to implant the chip in “high single digits” of patients this year. However, no details or exact timeline has been shared yet.

As per Reuters, Neuralink executive, Dongjin “D.J.” Seo, stated, “Once you do the brain surgery it takes some time for the tissues to come in and anchor the threads in place, and once that happens, everything has been stable.” As per the officials, Neuralink is now taking risk mitigation measures such as skull sculpting and reducing carbon dioxide concentration in the blood to normal levels in patients.

Matthew MacDougall, Neuralink’s head of neurosurgery said, “In upcoming implants, our plan is to sculpt the surface of the skull very intentionally to minimize the gap under the implant… that will put it closer to the brain and eliminate some of the tension on the threads.”