New Eye Chip Lets Blind Patients Read Again

Corporation, led by former Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak, has implanted its vision-restoring chip, PRIMA, into its first patient with Stargardt disease. This inherited condition gradually destroys central vision, leaving a blind spot. The patient, treated in May at Sydney Eye Hospital, was able to see a letter during his first rehab session and read a word in the second. The device is already commercially available in Europe for a different eye disease, geographic atrophy.

The PRIMA implant is a tiny 2mm by 2mm chip placed in the back of the eye during a one-hour procedure. Patients then wear special glasses with a camera that sends images to the chip, which stimulates the remaining retinal cells to send visual signals to the brain. It's like artificial photoreceptors. Currently, the vision is black and white and limited to a small central area—like looking through a straw—but it's sharp and high-contrast, allowing patients to read a few letters at a time.

Corporation is working on a next-generation implant that could be in humans within a year, with the goal of achieving near-native visual acuity within five years. The company sees this as a step toward broader brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that could treat neurological conditions like stroke and neurodegenerative diseases. Unlike Neuralink's device, which goes into brain tissue, Science Corporation's BCI sensor rests on top of the brain inside the skull.

This breakthrough offers hope to people with currently incurable blindness. While the current device has limitations, it represents a major advance in restoring vision and could lead to more powerful BCIs in the future. The technology is still in trials, but the early results are promising.