A team of scientists at ETH Zurich say they’ve developed a new type of electrode that rivals those used by other groups working on “brain pacemakers” and related tech, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Mehmet Fatih Yanik, a professor of neurotechnology at the public university based in Switzerland, said his team’s new electrode lets researchers get more detailed and precise recordings of brain activity over an extended period of time. Due to a process developed by the researchers, the bundles that make up those electrodes can be slowly inserted into the brain without causing “any detectable damage.”
They’re also slimmer than the electrodes used by companies like Neuralink, according to Yanik.
“The wider the probe, even if it is flexible, the greater the risk of damage to brain tissue,” Yanik said in a statement. “Our electrodes are so fine that they can be threaded past the long processes that extend from the nerve cells in the brain.”
The (potential) benefits
Some 200,000 people across the world are benefitting from neurostimulators, which stimulate specific nerves or regions in the body. Deep brain stimulation systems use that technology to help treat a number of diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. Brain-computer interface devices, or BCIs, like what Neuralink is working on, have been around since about 2004.
The researchers at ETH Zurich tested their electrodes on the brains of rats using four bundles, each of which had 64 electrode fibers, although Yanik said up to several hundred could be used to measure brain activity. Neuralink says its N1 brain chip records neural activity through 1,024 electrodes across 64 threads.
Yanik said his group has partnered with researchers at the University College London to test their electrodes in the brains of humans who suffer from epilepsy and do not respond to drug therapy. They are also looking into using the electrodes to stimulate human brain cells, which may help treat people with depression or schizophrenia, according to the university.
“This could aid the development of more effective therapies for people with neurological and psychiatric disorders,” Yanik said.
Where Neuralink stands
So far, Neuralink has implanted its brain chips into two patients, including 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who became a quadriplegic after a diving incident some eight years ago. The device, Telepathy, helps patients with severe paralysis control external technology — like a laptop or smartphone — using only neural signals.
Musk told podcaster Lex Fridman last month that Neuralink aims to perform another eight trials by the end of the year. Neuralink has said its second patient outfitted with the device has been able to use it to play first-person shooter games and design three-dimensional objects.
“If all goes well, there will be hundreds of people with Neuralinks within a few years, maybe tens of thousands within 5 years, millions within 10 years,” Musk wrote on Aug. 21, replying to Neuralink’s post about its second patient on X.