Science Corporation—a competitor to Neuralink founded by the former president of Elon Musk’s brain-interface venture—has leapfrogged its rival after acquiring, at a fire-sale price, a vision implant that’s in advanced testing,.

The implant produces a form of “artificial vision” that lets some patients read text and do crosswords, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

The implant is a microelectronic chip placed under the retina. Using signals from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses, the chip emits bursts of electricity in order to bypass photoreceptor cells damaged by macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in elderly people.

“The magnitude of the effect is what’s notable,” says José-Alain Sahel, a University of Pittsburgh vision scientist who led testing of the system, which is called PRIMA. “There’s a patient in the UK and she is reading the pages of a regular book, which is unprecedented.”  

Until last year, the device was being developed by Pixium Vision, a French startup cofounded by Sahel, which faced bankruptcy after it couldn’t raise more cash.  

That’s when Science Corporation swept in to purchase the company’s assets for about €4 million ($4.7 million), according to court filings.

“Science was able to buy it for very cheap just when the study was coming out, so it was good timing for them,” says Sahel. “They could quickly access very advanced technology that’s closer to the market, which is good for a company to have.”

Science was founded in 2021 by Max Hodak, the first president of Neuralink, after his sudden departure from that company. Since its founding, Science has raised around $290 million, according to the venture capital database Pitchbook, and used the money to launch broad-ranging exploratory research on brain interfaces and new types of vision treatments.

“The ambition here is to build a big, standalone medical technology company that would fit in with an Apple, Samsung, or an Alphabet,” Hodak said in an interview at Science’s labs in Alameda, California in September. “The goal is to change the world in important ways … but we need to make money in order to invest in these programs.”

By acquiring the PRIMA implant program, Science effectively vaulted past years of development and testing. The company has requested approval to sell the eye chip in Europe and is in discussions with regulators in the US.

Unlike Neuralink’s implant, which records brain signals so paralyzed recipients can use their thoughts to move a computer mouse, the retina chip sends information into the brain to produce vision. Because the retina is an outgrowth of the brain, the chip qualifies as a type of brain-computer interface.

Artificial vision systems have been studied for years and one, called the Argus II, even reached the market and was installed in the eyes of about 400 people. But that product was later withdrawn after it proved to be a money-loser, according to Cortigent, the company that now owns that technology.

Thirty-eight patients in Europe received a PRIMA implant in one eye. On average, the study found, they were able to read five additional lines on a vision chart—the kind with rows of letters, each smaller than the last. Some of that improvement was due to what Sahel calls “various tricks” like using a zoom function, which allows patients to zero in on text they want to read.

The type of vision loss being treated with the new implant is called geographic atrophy, in which patients have peripheral vision but can’t make out objects directly in front of them, like words or faces. According to Prevent Blindness, an advocacy organization, this type of central vision loss affects around one in 10 people over 80.  

The implant was originally designed starting 20 years ago by Daniel Palanker, a laser expert and now a professor at Stanford University, who says his breakthrough was realizing that light beams could supply both energy and information to a chip placed under the retina. Other implants, like Argus II, use a wire, which adds complexity.

“The chip has no brains at all. It just turns light into electrical current that flows into the tissue,” says Palanker. “Patients describe the color they see as yellowish blue or sun color.”

The system works using a wearable camera that records a scene and then blasts bright infrared light into the eye, using a wavelength humans can’t see. That light hits the chip, which is covered by “what are basically tiny solar panels,” says Palanker. “We just try to replace the photoreceptors with a photo-array.”

The current system produces about 400 spots of vision, which lets users make out the outlines of words and objects. Palanaker says a next-generation device will have five times as many “pixels” and should let people see more: “What we discovered in the trial is that even though you stimulate individual pixels, patients perceive it as continuous. The patient says ‘I see a line,’ “I see a letter.’”

Palanker says it will be important to keep improving the system because “the market size depends on the quality of the vision produced.”

When Pixium teetered on insolvency, Palanker says, he helped search for a buyer, meeting with Hodak. “It was a fire sale, not a celebration,” he says. “But for me it’s a very lucky outcome, because it means the product is going forward. And the purchase price doesn’t really matter, because there’s a big investment needed to bring it to market. It’s going to cost money.”  

During a visit to Science’s headquarters, Hodak described the company’s effort to redesign the system into something sleeker and more user-friendly. In the original design, in addition to the wearable camera, the patient has to carry around a bulky controller containing a battery and laser, as well as buttons to zoom in and out. 

But Science has already prototyped a version in which those electronics are squeezed into what look like an extra-large pair of sunglasses.

“The implant is great, but we’ll have new glasses on patients fairly shortly,” Hodak says. “This will substantially improve their ability to have it with them all day.” 

Other companies also want to treat blindness with brain-computer interfaces, but some think it might be better to send signals directly into the brain. This year, Neuralink has been touting plans for “Blindsight,” a project to send electrical signals directly into the brain’s visual cortex, bypassing the retina entirely. It has yet to test the approach in a person.