Science Corp's PRIMA Chip Reaches First Stargardt Patient

Science Corporation has placed its PRIMA retinal implant in a person with Stargardt disease for the first time. Stargardt disease is an inherited eye condition that slowly destroys central vision. CEO Max Hodak announced the milestone on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Hodak co-founded and was president of Neuralink before starting Science in 2021, and he used the appearance to explain how the eye chip connects to the company's larger plans for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

What happened in Sydney

The patient received the implant in May as part of an ongoing trial at the Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. In his first rehabilitation session, he could make out a letter. By the second session, he read a word.

PRIMA is already sold in Europe for people who have lost their sight to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. The company believes the same approach can work for other diseases, including Stargardt, which is currently considered incurable.

Stargardt disease attacks the outer retina, where the eye's light-sensing cells sit. Those cells gradually die, while the inner retina, which passes visual signals on to the brain, may stay intact. Patients develop a blind spot in the middle of their vision that grows over time. Roughly 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision to the disease.

How the device works

Implanting the device takes about an hour. Surgeons place a small chip at the back of the eye, in the area where the photoreceptors have degenerated. The patient then wears glasses with a camera, which send a view of the surroundings to the chip. In effect, the implant acts as a set of artificial photoreceptors.

Hodak described the brain's view of sight in simple terms. To the brain, vision is electrical activity travelling down the optic nerve. If the optic nerve can be made to signal correctly, he argued, the brain will see.

The current results come with clear limits. The implant measures two millimeters by two millimeters, and Hodak compared using it to "looking through a straw." Patients get a black-and-white patch in their central vision. It is not wide and it is not in color, but it is high-contrast and sharp enough to show a couple of letters at once.

The next goals are a wider field of view and finer detail. A larger implant has to account for the curvature of the eye, and the electrodes need to shrink to get closer to natural resolution. Hodak said a next-generation device is in development and should reach humans within the next year. He added that he thinks the company can get "pretty close to native acuity" over the next five years.

The BCI strategy behind it

For Hodak, the retina is simply part of the central nervous system. He groups cochlear implants, retinal prostheses and motor prostheses together as different kinds of BCIs, and he wants the field to move well beyond controlling computers.

Vision restoration is how Science plans to prove its methods and build a sustainable business first. Its brain sensor is meant to sit inside the skull on top of the brain, unlike Neuralink's device, which goes directly into brain tissue. The company has suggested it could help with neurological conditions, possibly including monitoring activity in patients with brain tumors.

Hodak said the first clinical indication for that technology has not been announced, but it is a neurodegenerative disease "that everybody's heard of." Stroke is also on the list. The long-term mission, he said, is to understand how the brain creates the mind and to learn to build engineered brains. Science expects many people will need some kind of BCI by age 60 or 70, with the aim of extending health span, not just lifespan.

Why It Matters

Most BCI coverage focuses on cursors and keyboards. Science is taking a different route: start with a medical problem that has a commercial product behind it, then expand. That suggests a more cautious path to revenue than the moonshot framing that often surrounds neurotech.

The results are still early. One patient reading a word is encouraging, but a straw-sized, black-and-white view is far from normal sight. It is worth watching whether the next-generation implant really reaches humans within a year, and whether the Sydney trial produces results across more Stargardt patients. The unnamed neurodegenerative target is the other thing to follow. That is where the company's broader BCI ambitions will face their first real clinical test.