In a post on X on January 29, Elon Musk said his company had implanted a chip into a person's brain and the patient was recovering well. Neuralink is developing a brain implant that will help severely paralyzed patients use nerve signals to control external technologies.

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Elon Musk once said he would implant a Neuralink chip in his brain. (Photo: NurPhoto)

Neuralink will begin recruiting patients for human clinical trials in fall 2023 after receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct the study in May 2023, according to a blog post.

Musk said Neuralink's first product is called Telepathy.

If the technology works as intended, patients with serious degenerative diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) could one day be able to communicate or access social media by using their minds to move cursors and type.

“Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a super typist or an auctioneer,” Musk wrote. “ That’s our goal.”

British genius physicist Stephen Hawking also had to live with ALS since the age of 21 and his life was tied to a wheelchair. He passed away on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76.

Human clinical trials are just one step on Neuralink’s path to commercialization. Medical device companies must go through multiple rounds of safety data collection and stress testing before securing final FDA approval.

Neuralink has not disclosed how many patients it will enroll in its initial human trials. Part of the emerging industry of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, Neuralink is perhaps the most well-known company in the field thanks to the celebrity of Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

BCI is a system that decodes brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. Several companies such as Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, Paradromics, and Blackrock Neurotech have also created systems with these capabilities.

Paradromics is aiming to launch its first human trial in the first half of this year. Precision Neuroscience conducted its first human clinical trial last year. A patient receiving Synchron’s BCI used it to post from CEO Tom Oxley’s Twitter account in 2021.

It is unclear which company was first to market.

(According to CNBC)