By Liam Drew
Neurotechnology company Paradromics will test its device in a trial aimed at safely restoring speech for people with severe motor impairments.
Paradromics, a neurotechnology developer, announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a first long-term clinical trial of its brain–computer interface (BCI). Early next year, the company — one of the closet rivals to Elon Musk’s neurotechnology firm Neuralink — will implant its device into two volunteers who were left unable to speak owing to neurological diseases and injuries. It has two goals: to ensure the device is safe; and to restore a person’s ability to communicate with real-time speech.
“We’re very excited about bringing this new hardware into a trial,” says Matt Angle, chief executive of Paradromics, which is based in Austin, Texas.
Paradromics’ BCI has an active area of roughly 7.5 millimetres in diameter of thin, stiff, platinum–iridium electrodes that penetrate the surface of the cerebral cortex to record from individual neurons around 1.5 mm deep. This is then connected by wire to a power source and wireless transceiver implanted in an individual’s chest.
Initially, the two volunteers will each have one electrode array implanted in the area of the motor cortex that controls the lips, tongue and larynx, Angle says. Neural activity will then be recorded from this region as the study participants imagine speaking sentences that are presented to them. Following previous work by researchers who are now collaborating with Paradromics1, the system learns what patterns of neural activity correspond to each intended speech sound.
