Elon Musk’s brain-interface technology company Neuralink hopes to implant their chips in humans with several spinal cord injuries at some point next year, if they receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
"Neuralink's working well in monkeys and we're actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it's very safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely," Musk said during The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit in an interview on Monday, when asked what the company is planning for 2022.
"We hope to have this in our first humans — which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics — next year, pending FDA approval," he said.
Musk went on to say that the company’s "standards for implanting the device are substantially higher than what the FDA requires."
He later added on Twitter that "Progress will accelerate when we have devices in humans (hard to have nuanced conversations with monkeys) next year."
Musk previously said in February that the company hoped to begin implanting its chips in humans by the end of 2021, and before that in 2019 Musk said that he hoped the human testing would start at some point in 2020. The biotechnology firm Synchron recently received approval from the FDA to begin human testing on their brain-interface technology, a "motor neuroprosthesis," according to the company.