Name: Fortune Global Forum 2024: Mind Meld - A Breakthrough in Brain Powered Communication
Uploaded: 2024-11-12
Duration: 14 min 18 s
Description: Presenter: Professor Tom Oxley, Founding Chief Executive Officer, Synchron

Presenter: Professor Tom Oxley, Founding Chief Executive Officer, Synchron

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Mind Meld - A Breakthrough in Brain Powered Communication

Photograph by Michael O’Shea for Fortune

Conferences

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very excited to be here to talk about what uh is an upcoming space and what promises to be um potentially uh very sh ground shifting for humanity in ways that are hard to appreciate right now. My name is Tom Oxley. I'm the CEO of Synchron. I'm an Australian neurologist. I moved to the US about uh six years ago. Um But about 12 years ago, I started this journey with funding from US Defense agency DARPA in what's now been a critical infrastructure investment in this now emerging space. We are five years into human clinical trials at this point with the num with 10 patients that have now been implanted without technology. And the initial application for this technology is in uh the need for people who have paralysis. We anticipate. This is going to be a very large um area of medical device uh which uh has not yet been addressed by any currently available technology. Paralysis is a wide ranging medical condition from a range of um afflictions of the body. And as as just mentioned, there's a, a prediction that this first generation healthcare t is going to be in the range of $400 billion. As a neurologist, I've been looking after patients who have suffered from injury or disease. And one way to think about how the problem is going to be solved is how does the brain engage with the world around us? You may not appreciate this, but there is a huge amount of information coming into the brain limited information going out at the bottom of that diagram. There is the brain stem which carries all the information out of the brain. So we already engage in a in a digital world every day. We all use our devices to engage with our day to day activities. So one way to think about this is that we can expand our capacity to engage in the world if we have multiple avenues of outputs from the brain. In other words, a virtual nervous system that can engage with the brain. So with people who have paralysis or disease, the brain is often intact and it's how the brain engages with the outside world that needs to be corrected for people who are suffering from that. It's a horrible way to live when you're locked inside your own skull. So the world is now ready and you might have heard about BC I. It's getting a lot of attention in mainstream media now, but this is happening off the back of decades of neuroscience research now, infrastructure that enables edge computing, um very active global leadership from the FDA, especially David mcmullan and now mainstream awareness. Many of you have probably heard of Elon Musk's Neuralink. And I would certainly say that over the course of fundraising over the last 12 years, there's been a big flip in how venture capitalists are thinking about the potential for this space. But there's been one piece missing which relates to how this technology can scale because most people think about open brain surgery for brain computer interfaces. And so what at Synchron we've done is we've looked back to take cues from the medical device field with what enables technology to scale out into market. And so the problem with open brain surgery right now is that none have scaled up to this point, cochlear devices for hearing deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease. Oops. Um if we just get over that, please and then uh epilepsy are in the order of around 10,000, uh 10,000 cases per year, um 10,000 cases per year per annum. These are tiny numbers relative to what we've seen in medicine before. And that's not going to be the solution for brain computer interface to go to treat the potential problem at hand. Instead, transcatheter is what unlocked cardiac treatment over a period of decades, going from open heart surgery to now, transcatheter therapies. We've seen a change um from, from the seventies to now, the year two, the year 2024 low hundreds of thousands to now millions of procedures being performed every year. And this happened over a period of decades from balloons, stents, pacemakers and valves. There's now 1 million cardiac stents being delivered in the USA. The key really has been to get out of the operating room and really no other area in medicine has grown like this over the past several decades. So Synchron asked the question, how can we take that revolution into neurotechnology and deliver technology at scale? So this is an example of how we deliver our first technology. We come up the Venus system through the jugular vein using a catheter to come up to the top of the brain and then deliver electronics into the inside of the blood vessels that can interface with the brain from the inside. We utilize a lot of the materials and knowledge that have been the basis for solutions in cardiac over a number of decades. And we've repurposed that to sense brain activity and turn that into outputs that are useful initially for people with paralysis. This is our first generation system. We are calling it sync one and it hopefully will become the first in class implantable brain computer interface. We've conducted two clinical trials over five years with 10 patients implanted. The best way to think about this is a brain controlled system that enables you to navigate through your personal devices without having to use your hands. You may not need this in the audience today, but for paralysis patients. This can be life changing where there is currently no available therapy. So here's one of our users, the system goes in it switches on, you start trying to move your arms and legs. We train the system how to move very simple things around the screen. This is not yet at the level of control of what you can do with a mouse and a keyboard, but it does enable basic use of ios. So we've been using control of Apple products to engage in navigate and select as a minimal viable product. This is where the technology will be starting with our first generation system. We've now engaging in the development of a novel BC IH ID Bluetooth profile. And the best way to explain this is that the example of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs didn't like the idea of the large iphone because your hand or your fingers could never reach all the way around the screen. He thought all phones should be reachable by any finger at any point in time. So that speaks to the idea that our devices are currently constrained to the built form factor of our human bodies. BC I is going to be constrained not by the physical form factor of the human body, but by the constraints of the brain. And I think we all know that there is more going on in your brain than what you can express. Maybe fighting with your partner or trying to express your emotions. There's far more things happening in your brain than your body can get out. So coming back to the virtual nervous system, I just want to explain how we're thinking about this problem. Probably the most common question I get asked by investors is how is this field going to progress and semiconductor chips? That was the that was the mechanism of Moore's law in in computers. So how do we think about progress over time with BC I? The prevailing theory or thinking has been that the number of channels or electrodes inside the brain think of them as sensors um is is the limiting factor. So more electrodes into the brain, more horsepower, more bandwidth. But we don't believe that to be true, we actually believe that optimizing brain diversity from a data perspective is what's going to drive compute. So compute versus bandwidth. And I want to explain that concept to you today. This is the motor cortex. This is where BC is beginning. It's the most relevant area to begin because it's the most constraining in our body. This is the command center of your brain. It takes up about a third of the real estate in your brain about the size of an A four piece of paper. If you, if you unwrap it, our first device only covers about 0.04% coverage of the whole motor cortex. It's a tiny amount. And we've done that with 16 electrodes that we deliver into the brain. You might have heard of the. And so as I mentioned, uh minimal viable product is navigate and select. And we're doing that on Apple I OS products. The Neuralink device is now being implanted in two subjects, has a much larger number of electrodes. But the idea had been that if you put in a much higher number of electrodes, you can get much more data out of the brain. Navigate select is also the same uh same control mechanism. But something we we noticed something interesting in that first neuralink device, 900 channels were lost in the first month. And that's been publicly reported. And then the system came back online with about 100 channels, about 10% of the number of channels and the function of the device didn't change. And it got us asking the question. OK. So if you had 1000 down to 100 there was no performance change. Why is that? Why were there was there redundancy in the system? And so we've had a theory for some time that there is a optimized amount of information. And the reason for that is that brain function is preserved in packets of neurons around the brain. So neurons that are next to each other do the same thing. The best analogy I can give is listening to a symphony orchestra, you put 1000 microphones on one violin and you're trying to hear the whole orchestra, you lose 900 of them. You're not losing that much information about what you're hearing in the room. So the question became, if you're trying to optimize a system for commercial manufacture and commercial scale, how do we think about redundancy and optimization? And we have a belief that at about the level of one millimeter, you have information redundancy in the brain. So it's not just horsepower of electrode count. it's have you spaced your electrodes in the brain at the right amount. So what we're saying is that at the microscopic scale, there's redundancy. The mess scopic scale is where we think there's the right optimization of naturalistic brain function. So with that in mind, we are building a system with multiple generations. And I want to explain how I think this field is going to progress over time. Firstly, maximizing brain coverage diversity. Secondly, people like their skulls. So leaving the normal physical architecture intact as much as possible. And finally, delivery scale, which I've covered already from the cardiac analogy. So at Synchron, our second generation system is utilizing the blood vessels and the blood vessels are like branches of a tree, they go down in order of size and they reach further and further. So we are minimizing and miniaturizing our electronics into the brain. A second generation system at a maximized at a maximized spacing is going to cover about 1% of coverage of the brain. We predict that will lead to 3D control of robotics. And then our third generation system, we're going to be targeting around 15% coverage in the brain. We don't exactly know what that's going to lead to. But we estimate that at that point, we're getting to full humanoid avatar control capabilities. And it's got us thinking a lot about where this field is headed in the next couple of decades and what it means from a data perspective and it hasn't been obvious because so the the recent the recent A I revolution has shown us that a massive data source can label you to do these incredible things with natural language processing. But from ABC I perspective, we don't have the advantage of having huge amounts of brain data, we actually have a time series brain data set. And what we've realized is the way the brain reacts is only relevant in the environment that it's reacting to. So you need to know how is the brain adapting to the environment? What is the context of how the brain is reacting in that moment? And can we build recursive uh A I platform that is going to enable this virtual nervous system to flourish? So here's our vision of the future axes on one hand model model fidelity over time and on the other hand, diverse brain region coverage, a previous couple of clinical trials with our prototype has got us beyond click one D click to two D and click which with our first commercial system as we move towards a miniaturized second generation system, getting towards 3D control and robotics and then finally moving towards an area that we don't fully appreciate yet. But what I can say is that we will pass the precipice of improving that which the human body can do. And so you know, the 400 billion Morgan Stanley number comes around 12 million user market potential. Beyond that, it starts to get up to an economy that looks a lot like the automobile industry to me. And it got me thinking about how do we think about where this is going to go and what it could mean. So I've been reflecting on the ethics and the morals of where this is going to take us. And it's this might not happen for a period of decades. But it does seem obvious to me that once we have enabled the ability for the brain to engage at the level that it can naturally process and not be limited by the muscles in our bodies, we are going to go on to the precipice of being able to achieve a level of human productivity that hasn't been possible. And I think we will look back as we all are now and think how slow we were. And so what does that make you think of or what it made me think of was something we've seen before, improved exponentially improved human productivity, functioning beyond the physical limit of the body and coming with a minor risk that requires a procedure. Now, the procedure risk, um, is probably less than what we take risks in our daily lives. And it made me think about the fact that when automobiles first appeared, appeared, um, there was huge blowback from the community. Why would you get in a motorized car and risk your life? Then we had flying and the same question were asked about, why would we take those risks and take that on? I think what's going to drive BC I out into the future is the need and demand for human productivity. And I think that's where BC I is going to take us in the future. Thank you.