Neuralink competitor and Biotechnology startup Science launched a new platform that aims to make it simpler for other firms to quickly develop and manufacture medical devices.
The new platform, Science Foundry, allows firms to use and build upon an internal infrastructure of Science by giving access to over 80 of its tools and services, such as a firm’s thin-film electrode technologies.
Science Co-Founder and CEO Max Hodak said, “The cost of the technology required to develop medical devices is often prohibitive for early-stage startups. Individual tools can cost anywhere from $200,000 to $2 million. For many startups that cost is too much to bear.”
Hodak is anticipating that Science Foundry will help these Startups.
Hodak said, “Hopefully, we bring down the barriers to innovation. There’s a bunch of smart people out there that have a bunch of different ideas than the ones that we have, and we would like to enable them.”
Science’s flagship brain-computer interface system is the Science Eye–a visual prosthesis that targets to help patients with two forms of serious blindness regain some form of visual input to their brains.
Hodak said, “The resulting images will look different from what people with healthy eyes used to–at least for the first iteration of the technology–but that it will be very restorative for patients with no light sensitivity. Eventually, Science will be able to reproduce high-resolution color vision.”
