Science Corporation implants vision chip in first Stargardt patient

Science Corporation CEO Max Hodak said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that the company has implanted its vision-restoring chip, PRIMA, in its first patient with Stargardt disease, an inherited eye disease that gradually destroys central vision. Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, said the work fits into Science Corporation’s broader pursuit of a brain-computer interface (BCI). “The retina is part of the central nervous system,” he said, grouping cochlear implants, retinal prostheses, and motor prostheses together as different types of BCIs.

PRIMA is already commercially available in Europe for patients who lost their sight to geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. Science Corporation believes the same approach can extend to other diseases, including Stargardt, which is currently considered incurable. Stargardt disease affects the outer retina, causing the gradual death of the eye’s light-sensing cells while potentially sparing the inner retina — the part that passes visual signals to the brain — and produces a central blind spot that gradually enlarges over time. Approximately 150,000 people worldwide have lost vision to the disease.

The company’s first Stargardt patient received the PRIMA implant in May, as part of an ongoing trial at Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. During the patient’s first rehabilitation session he saw a letter; during the second, he read a word. The procedure itself takes about an hour: surgeons place a small chip in the back of the eye, where photoreceptors have degenerated, and the patient then wears camera-equipped glasses that transmit a view of the world to the chip, which works like an artificial photoreceptor. Hodak described the current device as a 2-millimeter-by-2-millimeter implant producing sharp, high-contrast black-and-white vision in a narrow field — enough to make out a couple of letters at a time — with a bigger field of view, achieved by dealing with the eye’s curvature and shrinking the electrodes, as the next step.

Hodak founded Science Corporation in 2021 after leaving Neuralink, with plans to develop advanced neural-engineering and BCI technology; restoring vision is the company’s way of proving its methods work and building a sustainable business first. Its BCI sensor, unlike Neuralink’s, rests on top of the brain inside the skull rather than being inserted directly into brain tissue, and the company has said it could potentially help monitor neurological activity in conditions such as brain tumors or stroke. Hodak said he believes the next-generation PRIMA device will reach humans within the next year, and that over the next five years the technology should get fairly close to native visual acuity.

Why it matters

A vision implant built on the premise that “the retina is part of the central nervous system” positions Science Corporation to expand from one eye disease to a broader family of neurological conditions without building a new device category each time.