Science Corp implants PRIMA chip in Stargardt patient
Original: Science Corporation implants its vision-restoring chip in its first Stargardt disease patient
Why This Matters
Retinal BCI tech expanding into genetic blindness marks a new treatment frontier.
Science Corporation CEO Max Hodak announced at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company implanted its PRIMA vision chip in its first Stargardt disease patient in May 2026, at Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia.
Science Corporation has implanted its retinal chip, PRIMA, into a patient with Stargardt disease — an inherited condition that gradually destroys central vision and currently has no cure. About 150,000 people worldwide have lost sight to the disease. The procedure was performed in May as part of an ongoing trial at Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia. Results so far are promising: during the patient's first rehabilitation session, he identified a letter; by the second, he read a full word.
The surgery takes roughly an hour. A 2mm x 2mm chip is placed at the back of the eye where photoreceptors have died, then patients wear camera-equipped glasses that feed visual data wirelessly to the implant — effectively acting as artificial photoreceptors. Hodak noted the current field of view is narrow, describing it as "looking through a straw," with no color vision yet.
PRIMA is already commercially available in Europe for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration. CEO Max Hodak, formerly president and co-founder of Neuralink, framed the retina work within a broader BCI thesis: "The retina is part of the central nervous system," he said. "If you can get the optic nerve to signal the rest of the brain correctly, then you can provide vision."