Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to implant its brain chip in a second patient, as well as a modified procedure. The company’s brain-computer interface allows people with full-body paralysis use their thoughts to control outside technology.
The news comes on the heels of problems with Neuralink’s ongoing critical trial, where the implant’s threads, which record neural activity, retracted from the brain of the first trial patient. The first patient—29-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh—told The Wall Street Journal that only 15% of the threads in his brain are still in place.
In the modified procedure, Neuralink will place the threads 8 millimeters into the patient’s motor cortex, compared with 3 to 5 millimeters in Arbaugh’s brain.
