Science Corporation implants its vision-restoring chip in its first Stargardt disease patient

Science Corporation says it has implanted its PRIMA vision chip in its first patient with Stargardt disease, a genetic eye disorder that slowly wipes out central vision. CEO Max Hodak broke the news at TechCrunch Disrupt, where he used the moment to argue that retinal implants belong in the wider world of brain-computer interfaces, not off in a medical silo.

That’s a very Hodak argument. He left Neuralink, founded Science Corporation in 2021, and has been pushing a broader definition of BCIs ever since. In his telling, cochlear implants, retinal prostheses and motor prostheses all fit under the same umbrella. The retina, he said, is part of the central nervous system. Vision, stripped down, is electrical activity that travels down the optic nerve. If you can restore that signal, you can restore sight.

PRIMA is already sold in Europe for people who have lost vision to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. Science wants to show it can do more than one job. Stargardt disease affects the outer retina, killing the light-sensing cells while sometimes leaving the inner retina intact. The result is a central blind spot that grows over time, and roughly 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision because of it.

The company says the first Stargardt patient received the implant in May at Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. During the first rehabilitation session, the patient saw a letter. In the second, he could read a word. The setup is a tiny one: an hour-long procedure to place a 2 millimeter by 2 millimeter chip at the back of the eye, plus camera-equipped glasses that feed the chip a view of the world. It’s black-and-white and narrow, Hodak said, like looking through a straw. But it is sharp.

That narrowness is also the point. The near-term goal is to make the field of view bigger, then shrink the electrodes and deal with the eye’s curvature to get closer to native detail. Hodak said a next-generation version is already being worked on and should be in humans within the next year. Over five years, he thinks the company could get pretty close to native acuity. Bold talk, but at least this one comes with a patient, a hospital, and a letter on the page.