Elon Musk’s Neuralink implanted in second patient

Elon Musk said in a podcast with host Lex Fridman on Friday that a second trial patient has been implanted with the Neuralink brain-computer interface device.

The CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) and SpaceX (SPACE) identified the second patient as someone with a spinal cord injury similar to the first patient, with 400 of the implant’s electrodes currently working. Neuralink mentions on its website that its implant has 1,024 electrodes.

The first patient, Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old accident victim, received the device early this year as part of an FDA-authorized study. Earlier this year, Arbaugh had several threads come out of his brain implant weeks after the surgery.

Most recently, Neuralink management said that only 15% of the device’s channels were still operational in the first patient due to problems with the neural threads retracting. Despite this, the recipient, who is quadriplegic, can still use the device to read and play video games.

Musk was more upbeat in his recent comments on the second patient, noting the implantation “seems to have gone extremely well” with “a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well.” He said Neuralink may provide implants to eight more patients this year.