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Although his plans for brain implants have not yet been approved, Elon Musk is going ahead with them.
According to Reuters, one of the largest and most renowned neurosurgery clinics in the US has been asked to cooperate with the billionaire’s biotech company, Neuralink, on potential future human clinical studies. The corporation is in talks with the Barrow Neurological Center in Phoenix, Arizona, according to six anonymous people who spoke to Reuters.
Elon Musk Neuralink has said for years that human trials are just around the corner. But the US Food and Drug Administration has not yet given the company permission to place its brain-computer interface (BCI) devices inside people’s heads. In fact, it didn’t file its first application for this type of approval until 2022, even though Elon Musk had said publicly that human testing would begin in 2019. According to a report from early March, the FDA rejected the first of the company. application to test in people last year.
Still, Neuralink’s highly ambitious plan to use his brain implant to treat a wide range of diseases and disabilities, from blindness to paralysis, need not fail just because it was rejected. The fact that the company is still looking for an institution to work with for human testing shows that Elon Musk and other Neuralink executives are still confident in the future of their device.
Reporter tried to contact Neuralink for more information, but at press time, they had not responded. Like other Elon Musk businesses such as Twitter and Tesla, Neuralink rarely answers questions from reporters. Reporter also emailed the Barrow Neurological Institute, but they did not immediately respond.
A director of the Arizona Research and Treatment Center, on the other hand, told Reuters that Barrow would be a good place to do research on brain implants like what Neuralink wants to do.
Even so, talks about a partnership are not set in stone, and a deal is not a given. Sources who did not want to be named told Reuters that Neuralink has been in talks with more than just Barrow.
Neuralink used to work with the University of California, Davis to do animal research. Most notably, the biotech company worked at the California National Primate Research Center, which is part of UC Davis. A press release from the university in 2022 says the partnership ended in 2020 for reasons that were not made clear.
Neuralink is under investigation by two federal agencies at this time. The first is from the US Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General and is about how the company tests on animals. It comes after an animal rights group said Neuralink violated animal welfare laws and subjected its mammalian test subjects to unnecessary pain. Neuralink has said that the accusations of torturing animals are not true.
The Department of Transportation is reinvestigating the biotech company over claims that the biohazardous materials were not transported properly.
Elon Musk has talked a lot about how secure Neuralink is and how its ultimate goal is to turn humans into AI-proof cyborgs, but the company hasn’t done much yet. Neuralink’s most recent “show and tell” event was just a repeat of something that was done almost 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, other companies working on brain-computer interfaces have made progress on the steps they need to take to get to market. After winning FDA approval the previous year, Synchron said it implanted its first BCI device into a person in July 2022.
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Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn