Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, explained that the company sees its work with PRIMA as part of a broader pursuit of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). "The retina is part of the central nervous system," Hodak said. "We consider cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, motor prostheses, these are all different types of BCIs."
PRIMA is already commercially available in Europe for patients who have lost their sight to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. The company believes the same approach can be applied to multiple diseases, including Stargardt disease.
Stargardt disease affects the outer retina, causing the gradual death of the eye's light-sensing cells while potentially sparing the inner retina, which passes visual signals to the brain. It creates a central blind spot that enlarges over time. According to Hodak, approximately 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision due to the disease.
"One of the nice things about this device approach," Hodak said, "if you can get the optic nerve to signal the rest of the brain correctly, then you can provide vision to it." Hodak outlined a vision in which BCIs expand into a wide range of medical technology applications, beyond simply controlling computers.