A recent report from Reuters says the Food and Drug Administration, FDA rejects Elon Musk’s bid to test brain chip implants in humans.
According to Reuters, the Food and Drug Administration rejected Neuralink’s application to start human trials, a major setback for the ambitious yet contentious startup despite Elon Musk’s claims that the company’s implants are secure enough to be placed in his and his children’s brains. Neuralink is a startup that develops controversial human brain chips.
Seven current and former Neuralink employees told Reuters that the U.S. organization in charge of clinical trials turned down the company’s request to start human testing at the beginning of last year.
This disclosure comes as a surprise, given that Musk announced in November, last year that human testing for Neuralink might start as early as May 2023.
According to sources cited by Reuters, setting any target date to start human trials given the regulatory rejection is a “gamble.” Neuralink is now almost guaranteed to miss its own target date for FDA clearance of March 7, 2023, which it set last year.
Neuralink, which uses Bluetooth-enabled implants to help patients with neurological and physical impairments, has come under fire for the 1,500 animals, including monkeys, that are said to have perished in its tests. Neuralink, which Musk founded in 2016, has raised $363 million in total, according to Crunchbase.
In addition to Musk, other notable investors in the company include Google’s investment arm GV, billionaire Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the generative artificial intelligence program ChatGPT. Neuralink is one of Musk’s many ventures, as he is also the CEO and largest individual shareholder of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.