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Neuralink is a company that develops brain-computer interface (BCI) devices to assist people with paralysis and blindness and technologies that may expand the abilities of humans. The San Francisco, California-based company was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and Max Hodak. The BCIs in development by Neuralink are designed to be high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces that connect people and machines in productive ways. The company aims to solve brain diseases in the short term and have a fully functional machine-human interface in the long term. The initial goal of Neuralink has been for its implants “to give people with paralysis their digital freedom back” by letting them “communicate more easily via text, to follow their curiosity on the web, to express their creativity through photography and art, and, yes, to play video games.”
Neuralink’s devices build upon academic research in deep brain stimulation, cochlear implants, neurostimulation for epilepsy, and the Utah array. The Utah array, used for neural recording in BCI research and the BrainGate device, is made of a rigid grid of up to 128 electrode channels. In comparison, Neuralink states its systems can record from 1,500 or 3000 electrode channels. The thin, flexible electrodes are claimed to be less likely to cause tissue damage than the Utah Array, which is known to cause a tissue response that can interfere with recorded signals or damage brain cells. Elon Musk prefers to use the term "neural lace" for the BCIs in development by Neuralink. He took the term from a series of science fiction books written by the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks called The Culture.
Elon Musk presents an overview of Neuralink at a press conference held on July 16, 2019.
Pedram Mosehni, a bioengineer at Case Western Reserve University, and Randolph Nudo, a brain specialist at Kansas University Medical Center, created the start-up NeuraLink in 2015 to develop their idea for treating traumatic brain injuries with an electronic chip that is inserted into the brain. They wanted to make a chip capable of reestablishing damaged connections inside the brain by recording neurons in one brain area, then transmitting their activity to another. By 2013, the two founders developed a prototype that was shown to improve motor control in rats with brain damage.
In 2015, Mosehni and Nudo were challenged with raising money to continue their work and were approached by a buyer, whose identity was unknown to them at the time, wanting to purchase the trademark rights for their company's name, NeuraLink. The founders sold the company name to the mysterious buyer for tens of thousands of dollars (the actual amount is unknown). It was not until after the deal was made that Mohseni and Nudo learned that the mysterious buyer was actually Elon Musk. Musk decided to change the name of the company slightly from NeuraLink to Neuralink before officially founding the company in 2016. The eight people that founded Neuralink in 2016 were Elon Musk, Max Hodak, Tim Hanson, Tim Gardner, Venessa Tolosa, Ben Rapoport, Paul Merolla, Dongiin Seo, and Philip Sabes. As of 2023, two founders from this group, implant engineer Dongjin Seo and Elon Musk, remain with Neuralink.
Neuralink's cofounder, Max Hodak, graduated from Duke in 2012 with a degree in biomedical engineering. Hodak previously started companies MyFit and Transcriptic. Neuralink founding team members Timothy Hanson and Philip Sabes, along with Michel Maharbiz at UC Berkeley, developed a device dubbed the "sewing machine" that uses a stiff needle to drive flexible electrodes into the brain. Vanessa Tolosa has acted as Neuralink's microfabrication expert.
Max Hodak credited a 2003 paper in PLOS One, written by a team led by Miguel A.L. Nicolelis at Duke University, as the first to show macaque monkeys using their brains to make robotic arms reach and grasp; this research laid the foundation on which their work builds. Hodak previously did research in the Nicolelis lab at Duke.
The company is making a neural lace with the ability to recognize and interact with the electrical and chemical signals passing through the nervous system within neurons. Their devices in development detect the electrical field produced by nerve action potentials and record the information represented by a neuron. The brain is then represented by the firing statistics of action potentials. Neural recordings can be decoded and turned into electrical signals fed back to the nervous system or into robotic devices. Neuralink's N1 Sensor is designed to "record from and selectively stimulate as many neurons as possible across diverse brain areas." The company has three publicly stated goals for its neural lace technology:
- Increase by orders of magnitude the number of neurons one can read from and write to in safe, long-lasting ways
- At each stage, produce devices that serve the critical unmet medical needs of patients
- Make it as simple and automated as LASIK
Neuralink’s device was presented as a research platform for use in rodents and as a prototype for a fully implantable human BCI in a 2019 white paper in bioRxiv. It describes the system as utilizing a wired connection to maximize the bandwidth for raw data streaming for research and development. Clinical devices that will be derived from the platform are planned to be fully implantable, have onboard signal compression, reduced power consumption, wireless power transmission, and data telemetry through the skin without percutaneous leads.
A potential use of Neuralink's devices would be to allow people with paralysis to control computers and phones with their thoughts. This includes decoding movement intentions in the motor cortex, which could allow a paralyzed person to control avatars or assisted robotic devices. Neuralink also states that their technology could be used to decode speech intentions, which also originate in the motor cortex. In the 2019 presentation introducing Neuralink, Elon Musk stated the long-term goal is achieving symbiosis with artificial intelligence.
By feeding electrical stimulation back to the brain cortex, Neuralink also plans to provide the perception of visual stimulation to a blind person or touch feedback to help someone operate a prosthetic device. The idea is similar to how cochlear implants use an external device to convert sound to electrical stimulation of nerve fibers along the cochlea.
The Link (previously called N1 sensor or Link 0.9) is a BCI device that is implanted into the brain to allow the user to control a computer or mobile device. The Link is connected to micron-scale threads inserted into areas of the brain to control movement. The Link transmits neural signals received from the neural threads, which contain electrodes to detect neural signals. The device uses an inductive charger that wirelessly connects to the implant to charge the battery. The shape of the Neurolink BCI device changed to be coin-shaped and fit flush with the skull, rather than the previous design resting near the ear. Musk stated that the device matches the thickness of the piece of skull that had been removed to insert it. Musk stated on X on January 29, 2024, that Neuralink's first product is called Telepathy.
The PRIME Study (Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) is an investigational medical device clinical trial for Neuralink’s fully implantable, wireless BCI that aims to evaluate the safety of the implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and the functionality of the BCI for enabling people with quadriplegia to control external devices with their thoughts. A small implant is placed in the part of the brain that controls movements and interprets neural activity. The device is designed to allow the person to operate a computer or smartphone by intending to move without the requirement of physical movement. According to Neuralink, people who have quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) may qualify.
The PRIME study received U.S. FDA clearance in May 2023 and began recruiting patients in September 2023. On January 28, 2024, the first person enrolled in the trial received an implant. Participants in the PRIME Study will have nine visits with researchers in an eighteen-month period. They will then spend at least two hours a week on brain-computer interface research sessions and have twenty more research visits over the next five years.
The FDA classifies The Link as a Class III device. In early 2022, the FDA rejected Neuralink’s application for the device to be used in clinical trials. Some of the safety concerns raised by the FDA include the lithium battery, potential migration of tiny wires to other areas of the brain, and uncertainty over the ability to remove the device without damaging brain tissue. Neuralink launched a patient registry in late 2022 to learn more about individuals who may be interested in enrolling in future Neuralink clinical trials.
March 2023 NeuraLink update on FDA rejection
Stated plans for the first clinical study for the N1 sensor/Link focused on patients with quadriplegia due to C1–C4 spinal cord injury and will use a four-chip setup to enable patients to control their smartphones using their brains. One of the N1 sensors would be implanted in the somatosensory cortex, and the other three would be placed in the motor cortex. Each sensor has more than a thousand electrodes. Through that, they will be able to control a computer mouse and keyboard by using a Bluetooth connection. Musk stated in 2017 that it may be around eight to ten years before the device is available for people without disabilities.
The goal is for the procedure to take place under conscious sedation and local anesthetic. Each N1 Sensor will be placed into a patient's brain by a surgical robot. The robot will make a 2mm incision that dilates to approximately 8mm before the chip is implanted into the brain. The robot will place each thread (approximately 1/3 the size of a human hair) coming off of their N1 Sensor computer chip to their desired locations (determined by a neurosurgeon) within the brain. Threads are about the diameter of a neuron. The sensor will be placed to fill the hole in the skull, and the scalp will be closed over it. The procedure will produce an incision that can be glued shut and does not require stitches. Each chip placed within a patient's brain will have a power wire running under the patient's scalp to an inductive coil found behind the patient's ear. The inductive coil will be connected to a wearable device called "The Link," which acts as the power supply and Bluetooth radio. If The Link is removed, the implant will shut off and stop working.
Neurosurgical robot designed to insert electrodes of Neuralink's brain-machine interface device into precise brain regions.
The company claims that version one of their Neural Lace, called the N1 Sensor, is made of 1024-channel sensors on a 4mm by 4mm computer chip, and that it is possible to scale their chip to contain up to 10,000-channel sensors in later versions. The N1 chip is made to communicate with other devices wirelessly and is capable of reading and writing information. The N1 Sensor will be controllable through a mobile application, a Bluetooth mouse, and a Bluetooth keyboard to help patients learn how to use the chip effectively after implantation while they are at home.
The surgical robot developed by Neuralink is made to perform the placement of threads coming off the N1 sensor into a patient's brain during surgery. The robot's insertion needle is milled from a 40-micrometer diameter tungsten-rhenium wire stock that is electrochemically etched into a 24-micrometer diameter for the length of the insertion needle that gets inserted into the brain. A diagram of the insertion needle can be found below, along with an image of the insertion needle inserting a thread of the N1 Sensor:
Image of the Neuralink surgical robot using the insertion needle to place a thread coming from the N1 Sensor into an agar solution.
Image demonstrating the size of the insertion needle found on the Neuralink surgical robot.
The robot registers insertion sites to a common coordinate frame with landmarks on the skull and also uses depth tracking to target anatomically defined brain structures. Insertion sites are pre-selected for planning optimal paths to minimize tangling and strain on threads and avoid vasculature damage. The robot can insert up to six threads per minute. While the system is automated, a surgeon can make manual micro-adjustments.
The main substrate and dielectric used in the probes is polyimide encapsulating a thin, gold film trace. Each thin film array has a “thread” area with electrode contacts and traces and a “sensor area” where the film interfaces with custom chips enabling signal amplification and acquisition. The devices can be manufactured in a high-throughput manner using a wafer-level microfabrication process. On a wafer, ten thin film devices are patterned, each with 3,072 contacts. Each array has forty-eight or ninety-six threads, with each containing thirty-two independent electrodes. A flip-chip bonding process is used to bond integrated chips to the contacts on the sensor area of the thin film.
To keep the channel count high with a minimal-size thread to minimize tissue displacement in the brain, stepper lithography and other microfabrication techniques are used. A metal film at sub-micron resolution is produced. Threads are reported to be normally 4 to 6 micrometers thick, including up to three layers of insulation and two layers of conductor and are 20 mm long. Surface modifications are used to lower impedance for electrophysiology and increase the effective charge-carrying capacity of the interface. Treatments include polymer poly-ethylenedioxythiophene doped with polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) and iridium oxide (IrOx).
The custom Neuralink application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is used to build the electronics component, which consists of 256 individually programmable amplifiers (“analog pixels”), on-chip analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and peripheral control circuitry for serializing the digitized outputs. The Neuralink ASIC forms the core of a modular platform. Neuralink uses a number of ASICs integrated into a standard printed circuit board using flip-chip integration. The systems are packaged in titanium cases coated in parylene-c as a moisture barrier. Neural data from these systems are streamed from an ethernet-connected base station. Each station can connect up to three implants simultaneously.
Neuralink released a white paper in 2019 that describes their BCI/BMI system. In 2020, Neuralink showcased a pig named Gertrude implanted with their BCI device that records signals from an area of the brain that receives touch information from her snout. In a livestream “show and tell” event in November 2022, Elon Musk stated that one of the applications of Neuralink BCI technology would be the restoration of vision to people with blindness and showed that a Neuralink implant stimulated a visual sensation in a monkey’s brain. A challenge acknowledged by Neuralink in 2019 is to achieve longevity of the devices and to prevent potential safety issues due to the device breakdown in the harsh environment inside the brain. There are no peer-reviewed academic publications by Neuralink on PubMed as of April 2023.
Neuralink’s 2019 non-peer reviewed whitepaper demonstrates two of their devices, System A and System B, were implanted in rats and took electrophysiological recordings as they moved around freely. Digitized broadband signals were processed in real time to identify action potentials, also referred to as spikes, using an online detection algorithm. Neuralink uses custom spike-detection software to filter out false positive spikes. Their threshold was set to >0.35 Hz to quantify the number of electrodes recording spiking units. The simultaneous recording from over 3000 inserted electrodes in a freely moving rat was reported. The placement of electrodes was successful 87% of the time in nineteen rats. Neuralink did not demonstrate capabilities for modulating neural activity but states their device is designed to be capable of electrical stimulation on every channel.
Joseph E. O’Doherty, neuroengineer at Neuralink, is one of the first co-authors on a paper published in BioRxiv in April 2019 with his previous team of researchers in Brazil, Russia, and at Duke University. The paper described monkeys using brain-machine-brain interface that learned to interpret intracortical microstimulation of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and propose the potential to incorporate their approach into upper-limb neuroprostheses.
Supin Chen and Vanessa M. Tolosa of Neuralink are authors of a Journal of Neural Engineering paper describing the design and fabrication of silicon insertion shuttles for faster, easier, and less damaging implantation of polymer arrays into the brain.
In August 2020, Musk revealed a "three little pigs demo," in which a pig named Gertrude had been implanted with a Neuralink implant. Musk stated the company, using implant data, predicted a pig’s limb movement at a "high accuracy" during a treadmill run.
In April 2021, Neuralink demonstrated that a monkey named Pager with a brain implant device called "Link" was able to play the game Pong without using a joystick and only its brain.
Demonstration of a monkey playing Pong with implanted "Link" device
