In An Effort To Accelerate Medical Device Innovation, Neuralink Competitor Science Launches A New Platform

Science, a biotechnology startup and rival of Neuralink, unveiled a new platform on Monday with the goal of facilitating the speedy development and production of medical devices by other businesses.

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The platform, known as Science Foundry, gives businesses access to more than 80 of the company's products and services, including its thin-film electrode technologies, enabling them to make use of and expand upon Science's internal infrastructure.

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According to Science Co-Founder and CEO Max Hodak, the expense of the technology needed to develop medical devices is sometimes "prohibitive" for early-stage firms. Individual instruments can cost anywhere between $200,000 and $2 million, and according to Hodak, businesses could easily invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the construction of a production line. 

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Such expense is unaffordable for many firms, but Hodak is hopeful Science Foundry can provide assistance.

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We should hopefully lower the obstacles to creativity, said Hodak. "There are a lot of intelligent people who have views that are different from ours, and we would like to enable them,"

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The market for brain-computer interfaces, or BCI, is expanding and includes science. A BCI is a device that interprets brain impulses and converts them into instructions for remote technologies. Due to the high profile of its founder Elon Musk, who also serves as the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, Neuralink is arguably the most well-known brand in the industry.

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Hodak co-founded Neuralink and led it as president up until the time of his resignation in 2021. Hodak worked on the creation of a BCI system at Neuralink that is intended to be inserted into the brain right away, but he is currently developing an implant at Science that doesn't even touch the brain.

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The Science Eye, a visual prosthesis designed to help people with two serious forms of blindness return some visual information to their brains, is Science's flagship BCI technology.

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The Science Eye uses a micro-LED matrix that is implanted so over retina and is extremely thin and flexible. The optogenetic gene therapy used by Science to change a set of gentle cells in the visual cortex is controlled by the implant. When one pixel in the array turns on, a cell in the optic nerve turns on as well, allowing it to drive the neuron and transmit visual information to the brain.

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Special spectacles with built-in cameras and tiny sensors power science's implant. The images that the LED array receives from the glasses are converted before being sent up to the optic nerve.

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According to Hodak, the visuals produced by the technology will differ from what people with eye health are used to, at least in the initial version, but they will be extremely restorative for individuals with little light sensitivity. He predicted that science would eventually be able to duplicate high-resolution color vision.

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The technique has been tested scientifically on rabbits, and according to Hodak, the business plans to start testing it on patients as early as next year.

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The business's next platform, Science Foundry, is designed to assist businesses with similarly ambitious concepts. But, Hodak added that other medtech companies and even quantum businesses present growth potential. He expects to see interest from other engages in the development companies.

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With university facilities being "affordable to start with," Hodak claimed that the cost of just using Science Foundry is similar to that of doing so. Yet Hodak asserted that customers of Science Foundry will find it simpler to commercialize their goods, despite the fact that academic institutes normally forbid businesses from testing devices on patients or putting them on the market.

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According to Hodak, the platform will help Science and the entire industry.

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This allows us to afford larger scale and additional capabilities, which we can use to better help the community and ourselves, he said.