Neuralink rival sets brain-chip record with 4,096 electrodes on human brain
Precision expects its minimally invasive brain implant to hit the market next year.
The high density of electrodes allows neuroscientists to map the activity of neurons at unprecedented resolution, which will ultimately help them to better decode thoughts into intended actions.
Precision, like many of its rivals, has the preliminary goal of using its brain-computer interface (BCI) to restore speech and movement in patients, particularly those who have suffered a stroke or spinal cord injury. But Precision stands out from its competitors due to a notable split from one of the most high-profile BCI companies, Neuralink, owned by controversial billionaire Elon Musk.
Precision was co-founded by neurosurgeon and engineer Ben Rapoport, who was also a co-founder of Neuralink back in 2016. Rapoport later left the company and, in 2021, started rival Precision with three colleagues, two of whom had also been involved with Neuralink.
In a May 3 episode of The Wall Street Journal podcast The Future of Everything, Rapoport suggested he left Neuralink over safety concerns for the company's more invasive BCI implants.
To move neural interfaces from the world of science to the world of medicine, "safety is paramount," Rapoport said. "For a medical device, safety often implies minimal invasiveness," he added. Rapoport noted that in the early days of BCI development---including the use of the Utah Array—"there was this notion that in order to extract information-rich data from the brain, one needed to penetrate the brain with tiny little needlelike electrodes," he said. "And those have the drawback of doing some amount of brain damage when they're inserted into the brain. I felt that it was possible to extract information-rich data from the brain without damaging the brain." Precision was formed with that philosophy in mind—minimal invasiveness, scalability, and safety, he said.
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do NOT take the chip!