Science Corporation Implants Vision-Restoring PRIMA Chip in First Stargardt Patient

By Nathan Brooks

A patient with Stargardt disease read a word during his second rehabilitation session after receiving Science Corporation's PRIMA chip — the first implant in a person with the inherited condition, which today has no cure. CEO Max Hodak announced the milestone on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, framing it as the opening move in a much broader brain-computer interface play.

Hodak knows this territory. He's the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, and he left that company in 2021 to found Science Corporation around advanced neural engineering and BCI technology. His argument is that the category is far bigger than the devices that read thoughts to control computers.

"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."

Why Stargardt matters commercially

PRIMA already sells in Europe for patients who've lost sight to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. Science Corporation believes the same hardware can treat multiple diseases, and Stargardt is the proof case.

The numbers explain the urgency. Roughly 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision to the disease. It attacks the outer retina, killing the eye's light-sensing cells, while potentially sparing the inner retina that carries visual signals to the brain. The result is a central blind spot that keeps expanding.

The first Stargardt patient received the implant in May as part of an ongoing trial at Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. In his first rehabilitation session, he saw a letter. In the second, he read a word. That's the whole arc so far — small, but concrete.

How the device actually works

The procedure takes about an hour. Surgeons place a small chip at the back of the eye, exactly where the photoreceptors have degenerated. Patients then wear camera-equipped glasses that transmit what they see to the chip, which functions as artificial photoreceptors.

Hodak was blunt about the current limitations of what the patient experiences:

"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. "It is not a big field of view color vision. It's a patch in their central vision where . . . it's black and white, but it is sharp. It's high-contrast sharp, and so they can see a couple letters at a time. The next step is to make the field of view bigger."

Scaling up means engineering work. A bigger implant has to handle the curvature of the eye, and the electrodes need to shrink to get closer to native levels of visual detail.

"I think we have a clear path," Hodak continued. "There's a there's a next 'next generation' that's being worked on that'll be in humans in the next year, and over the next five years, I think we'll be able to get pretty close to native acuity."

So what does this change for practitioners and investors watching the BCI space? It signals a revenue-first sequencing strategy: prove the methods, build a sustainable business restoring vision for the visually impaired, then expand the platform.

A different architecture than Neuralink

The company's broader BCI design diverges from its founder's old shop. Science Corporation's sensor sits inside the skull and rests on top of the brain — unlike Neuralink's device, which is inserted directly into brain tissue. The company has said the device could help address neurological conditions, including possibly monitoring neurological activity in patients with brain tumors.

Hodak also teased the pipeline. "In the near term, we're going to be applying our first clinical indication, which hasn't been announced publicly, is a neurodegenerative disease that everybody's heard of," he said. Stroke is on the roadmap too. His reasoning: if part of the brain has died from stroke, and you can connect two deep-brain areas, "you can imagine adding new cortical areas, just like adding new brain areas entirely — something simply not possible with conventional electrodes."

The long game, in his words, is grander still: "The long-term mission of the company is to understand how the brain creates the mind and to learn to build engineered brains."

The 60-to-70 thesis

Hodak's market thesis is aging itself. He believes many people will eventually use some kind of BCI, and while Science Corporation isn't designing for "healthy 40-year-olds," he expects people will need some form of BCI by age 60 or 70.

"We want to figure out how do we extend not just lifespan but health span," Hodak said.

For now, the near-term metric to watch is simple: whether the next-generation implant, promised in humans within a year, widens that straw-narrow field of view and moves the technology from proof of life toward a genuine treatment category.

• First Stargardt patient implanted in May at Sydney Eye Hospital, Australia
• PRIMA already commercially available in Europe for geographic atrophy
• Next-generation device expected in humans within a year; near-native acuity targeted in five years