"The retina is part of the central nervous system," Hodak said on stage. "We consider cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, motor prostheses, these are all different types of BCIs. " Hodak outlined a vision in which BCIs expand into a wide range of medical technology applications, rather than simply being a way to control computers.
While PRIMA is commercially available in Europe for patients who've lost their sight to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, the company believes its approach can be applied to multiple diseases, including Stargardt disease, which is currently considered incurable. Stargardt disease affects the outer retina, causing the gradual death of the eye’s light-sensing cells while potentially sparing the inner retina, the part that passes visual signals onto the brain. It causes a central blind spot that gradually enlarges over time.
Approximately 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision due to the disease. "One of the nice things about this device approach, when I was saying the brain's a computer, vision is electrical potential, like electrical activity down the optic nerve," Hodak said. "That's all vision is to the brain, and so if you can get the optic nerve to signal the the rest of the brain correctly, then you can provide vision to it. " The company says its first patient with Stargardt disease received the PRIMA implant in May as part of its ongoing trial at the Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia.
During the patient's first rehabilitation session, he saw a letter, and during the second, he was able to read a word. To use the device, patients undergo an hour-long procedure that plants a small chip in the back of their eye, where the photoreceptors have degenerated. Then they wear camera-equipped glasses that transmit a view of the world to the chip. The implant essentially works like artificial photoreceptors. "The device that this patient has is a two millimeter by two millimeter implant placed under the in the back of the eye, and so it's like looking through a straw," Hodak said.