Lisbon, Nov. 14, 2025 (Lusa) - The founder and CEO of Science, which develops brain-computer interfaces, said in an interview with Lusa that he expects the PRIMA retinal prosthesis to be approved next year following clinical trials.

In October, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published an original peer-reviewed article on an innovative clinical study of the PRIMA brain-computer interface (BCI) retinal implant, developed by Science, which restored functional central vision in patients suffering from geographic atrophy due to age-related macular degeneration, one of the main causes of blindness.

"The hope is that next year, PRIMA, our flagship retinal prosthesis will be approved for the market," said Max Hodak when asked what he would like to achieve in a year.

Max Hodak, who helped create Neuralink, was one of the speakers at this year's Web Summit.

With PRIMA's approval, "instead of just being in the clinical research phase, we'll finally be able to start showing it to patients," he added, as it is not yet approved.

Science is considered a leader in Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), "focussed on enabling a more promising future through neural engineering", says the company.

"The brain is a computer. Therefore, brain computer interfaces (BCI) are not a product, but an area of study," explains Max Hodak, adding that there are many different types of products being developed within this area.

"Initially, the area of BCI emerged from the broader field of neuroscience, which is generally concerned with questions such as what brains are and how they work," explains the CEO, who has a background in biomedical engineering.

Then this area began to branch out into the separate field of neural engineering, "where the interest is not only to understanding what brains are, but also how we can interact with them for some kind of specific purpose, whether it's restoring sight to people who have gone blind or hearing to people who are deaf, restoring the ability to move smoothly in people with Parkinson's, or perhaps restoring a faculty lost due to a stroke".

There has been "very interesting" research at UCSF for some time showing that depression can be treated very effectively "with a deep brain stimulator", he says, all of which are types of BCI, in a way.

"In our company, Science, we work mainly with blind people, and we have two programmes for this," he says.

The first is PRIMA, which recently made the cover of Time magazine, and the results of the clinical trial were published in NEJM.

"It's proof of concept that we're on the right track, but there are obvious ways to improve it. And we're going to keep doing it so that we can bring it to more patients who have less disability, who are younger and who perhaps have more residual vision," adds Max Hodak.

In addition, "we have another technology that we call the biohybrid neural interface, which uses live neurons to connect to the brain instead of wires, bypasses the limitations of traditional neural interfaces and minimises damage to the brain.

In this case, the implant is not in the eye, but in the skull, in the brain, and for this "we use living cells to make the connection with the brain," he says.

"What we have is the ability to load a device with these engineered biological neurons and then simply place it on the surface of the brain, where it grows and forms new biological connections. And it forms many of them, millions or potentially billions," and could have a wide range of applications, from Parkinson's to epilepsy.

Unlike BCI, "AI is certainly much more famous now and has had a much bigger impact. I mean, ChatGPT is used by a billion people," says Max Hodak, emphasising that Science is not alone and there is a "large global academic community" working in this area. There are about six or seven significant BCI companies at the moment, he says.

"The brain is the only organ I really care about," he says.

Max Hodak says that the idea that only 10% of the brain is used is a misconception.

"The reality is that we use practically the whole brain, but the brain is very quiet. That's true. Only a small percentage of neurons are active at any given time, but they are still connected in some way," he concluded.

ALU/ADB // ADB.

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