The Ledger, every show

“I think it is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now. And I think it might be many more people than you think. It's not gonna be like one or two people on earth today.”

“Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way.”

“We use that constructively at science like that. So we know that that is. That is true because we can get alignments between animal brain neural recordings and AI model internal representations.”

“The two leading causes of death though, are cardiovascular disease and cancer is not metastasized to the brain. And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work.”

“One of the things that I think will be possible with ultrasound is like a digital Ambien or like a digital Adderall. So can you like stimulate part of the brain to cause focus or sleep and things like that? Would not surprise me if that was possible. And that …”

“My view on this is not that I think healthy, 30 year olds are going to be getting these soon, but eventually many people become patients. Aging is like the correlate of kind of everything getting worse. And so there's some critical age where it kind of crosses…”

“I mean, I do think that you can get to close to native acuity, so kind of like your normal twenty-twenty vision. We're definitely not there yet, but I see a path to get there and be able to get Color and fill in a lot of the field of view. To be clear that it'…”

“If the end of the quest of artificial intelligence are super intelligent machines, then I think the end of the BCI quest are actually conscious machines.”

“When you train AI models, like image models or, and even language models the representations that you get inside them look a lot like the representations you see in the brain.”

“When you look inside these AI models, you see These mathematical objects that look a lot like what you see in the brain in neuroscience. Like, the representations are converging, and this is an empirical finding.”

“Probably not next year, but I think within the next decade. Wow. It's very possible that this stuff is going to get figured out in a meaningful way. I think like, 2035 will be a very, very different world than 2025.”

“There's a gene therapy that's on market that costs almost a million dollars a patient, and it doesn't, first of all, it's only applicable for, like, three percent of patients that have this type of blindness, and it also just doesn't really work. Like, it very…”

“When I think about the next generation BCI technologies that are on the horizon that are getting developed, I think it's very possible that in the next four or five years, there'll be some patients that maybe had a stroke, maybe had Some other injury, who, you…”

“The TAM will grow over time for this first version. It's on the scale of like hundreds of thousands of patients in the U S and Europe. So for the current version of Freeman is probably hundreds of thousands of patients. And then the next version, which is Goin…”

“If I put an electrode almost anywhere in your brain and then wake you up in during surgery, And I show you a flashing light that is, that flashes proportionally to how much that neuron is firing, at least almost anywhere in cortex. Within a couple of minutes, …”

“The qualia of Prima is, is normal sight. It's black and white. It's only a, it's a small field of view, but it's vision.”

“And with our retinal prosthesis that we, what we saw in the trial was we can take a patient who's been unable to see faces for a decade and allow them to read every letter on an eye chart.”

“As far as I know, our clinical trial was the first time ever that form vision had been, like, had created, like, a coherent image in the mind's eye of a person.”

“It was an empirical discovery of our study that if you excite the bipolar cells with an image, you get an image in the mind's eye, because that is clearly the critical processing step in the retina that you wanted to preserve.”

“What we were able to do were find optogenetic proteins that are so sensitive that they're sensitive to like indoor office lighting”

“But it comes with the potential of growing throughout the brain, forming biological connections all over the place. And I mean, that's what we've seen in, in the animal models. That's not in humans yet”

“And I think biohybrid in particular is only really necessary for some of like the very highest end things. And on the flip side, it will be harder to deploy for many other important medical needs and important applications along the way. And we'll probably be …”

“Like one of the big companies in the space, it turns out that they're like private jet logistics business is bigger than their medical device business.”

“What we ended up doing is we developed indigenously a state of the art gene therapy, which is probably going to humans next year.”

“So it took us about two years for post acquisition to get it to the place where this was possible, but we just in July got marketing approval in Europe for Prima to start commercially selling it there.”

“We think we see a path to get at least red and green. Blue is a little bit trickier.”

“I mean, in the clinical trial, I mean, the main thing was just the existence proof of like that success was a possible outcome, right? Like that we had patients filling in Sudoku puzzles or crossword puzzles. There were patients that were reading books.”

“We're still relatively far from a human connectome, but I think we're not that far from a mouse connectome.”

“Second site, 10 years ago, they, so there's a company about a decade ago that had a retinal prosthesis that works differently than ours does. It did not get the type of performance that Prima does, but was Briefly approved. Cause then there's really nothing fo…”

“In the mid-twenty-tens, there's a gene therapy that works, that is only relevant in the first place for about five percent of patients in one narrow indication. And it really doesn't work that well. It gets .one lines of improvement. It kind of slows the rate …”

“Through a mix of the BCIs that allow you to kind of change the system, the thing that it's interacting with and our perfusion medicine program we think that there's ways to significantly improve not just lifespan, but healthspan and kind of create a better qua…”

“There's this, like, 10 bit per second kind of famous, like, cognitive bottleneck. There's this observation that the brain seems to process information, like, if there's a bunch of ways you can triangulate this, you can put somebody with, A perfect memory on a …”

“We finished a big clinical trial last year, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the fall.”

“Spoken word is like 40 bits per second. You can, many people can type in the like 20, twenty-ish bits. And so the 10 bit per second cortical motor decode is like not going to make your life better. I wouldn't get serious brain surgery for that.”

“There actually are some cases of patients that were born blind who but it wasn't it wasn't a loss of the optic nerve, it wasn't something in the brain, but they had congenital cataracts, so their vision was blurry from birth, and they were never able to really…”

“The deeper question is like, what is the qualia of like a brain to brain of like an ultra high bandwidth, like a bio hybrid neural interface. And that is just like, I don't like impossible to imagine. I, those devices will get built and we're going to find out…”

“One of the nice things about our device is that it doesn't We're somewhat agnostic to the reason that you lost the photoreceptors, and so we think it'll also work for retinitis pigmentosa, for Stargardt's, for these other indications.”

“And then we could target them to the bipolar cells, but that still has like five to seven years of clinical translation away if it ends up working, and there's a bunch of Pitfalls it could run into along the way”

“Many people in neuroscience have gone over to AI because they're basically still doing neuroscience, but it's just way easier to do it on the models.”

“So our lead program at Science is a retinal prosthesis. It's a chip that's implanted in the back of the eye. We just, we finished a major clinical trial last summer in age-related macular degeneration where patients that are unable to recognize faces have been…”

“From the 1.5 million optic nerve cells, that eventually connects up to a quarter billion to half a billion cells in visual cortex, And that, that in humans is extremely difficult to stimulate. No one is, I mean, you get some flashes of light if you do that, bu…”

“As these technologies, ah, really improve, and we are really able to extend life and improve it for many decades, this is gonna be, there's gonna be some kind of reckoning in healthcare.”

“The first sales will happen in the coming weeks.”

“There's a big clinical trial in Europe across 17 sites, and there's a huge effect.”

“In the first experiments for this, they actually didn't fit anything at all. They just took a couple, they took two neurons or a handful of neurons and fixed the weights. So it said, when this neuron fires more, we're going to go up the screen. When this neuro…”

“One of the diseases that Prima or electrical similar doesn't treat is glaucoma, which is loss of the optic nerve itself.”