Early days and as it stands only one patients evolving results but; but what results. These Neuralink implants are a new chapter.... godspeed to all involved in this work.
from the AFR
Meet the Australian beating Elon Musk in the battle for the brain
This neurologist has built technology allowing humans to control machines with just their thoughts. Now he’s racing Tesla’s founder to take it to the masses.
Not long after we sit down for lunch, Tom Oxley asks me if I have watched the Netflix sci-fi series
Black Mirror.
I have, in fact, just finished bingeing the latest series, which centres on dystopian tales of transferable human consciousness and brain implants.
As a world-leading pioneer in
brain-computer interface (BCI) systems, Canberra-born Oxley has been working on these concepts his entire career, and he is clearly excited the technology’s potential has made its way into popular culture. His take on the future is less sinister than the world-ending scenarios depicted in
Black Mirror.
“
There is the potential for brain-computer interface to overcome the physical limitations with how our brain talks to the world,” Oxley says, his enthusiasm disguising any jet lag he may be feeling after landing in Sydney from New York just a few hours ago.
“
The reason that [Jeff] Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, [Mark] Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are all talking about this is there is a view that the capacity for BCI to carry humans to another level is there. It sounds sci-fi, but it’s very real, and it is coming in our lifetime.”
It is heavy stuff for a sunny day ..... The technology Oxley has developed enables people to use their thoughts to control a digital device, changing the lives of severely paralysed patients. This could potentially help millions of people, but he says there are also broader applications in a possible future where we could, for example, think our lunch orders or conduct this interview telepathically.
Oxley, 44, is an interventional neurologist who oversaw the technology’s development in Melbourne. In 2012, he co-founded Synchron, the company that is the vehicle for making his radical vision a reality, then moved to the United States with his wife and two children in 2015 because that is where the funding is.
Synchron, which raised $US75 million in 2022, is now looking to raise more than double that in a new round to fund a large-scale clinical trial which will form the base of its submission to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take the technology to market.
Tech billionaires Gates and Bezos have invested in the company, which has developed a chip that is implanted via a blood vessel on the surface of the brain. Oxley calls it a “joystick for your body” which allows users who cannot speak or move their limbs to use thoughts to control a personal device via Bluetooth.
His closest competitor is Musk’s neuroscience start-up, Neuralink. The day we have lunch,
Bloomberg has published a story saying Neuralink is raising $US500 million ($780 million) at a valuation of $US8.5 billion. “That’s an Elon valuation,” Oxley quips.
He does not feel threatened by Musk, despite his access to capital and influence over the Trump administration. Synchron has a five-year head start on trials in humans and uses a less-invasive procedure which is similar to the placement of stents for the heart, rather than cutting through a skull.
“Those [US] investors are now close to a 100-times return on that investment that all the Australian VCs passed on.”
“In the ’60s, Bruce McLaren was asked how was he possibly going to compete with Ferrari. He said, ‘If we had all the money Ferrari had, we wouldn’t be focused.’
That’s an interesting way to look at it,” Oxley says, referring to the New Zealand racing driver who founded Formula One giant McLaren.
“
We’re way out in front. We started our clinical program in Melbourne in 2019 and Neuralink started five years later in 2024. They are raising $1 billion, but you can’t buy your way through these timelines because you have to show safety.”
Manhattan-based Oxley is in Australia to see his family (his father is former diplomat and top trade negotiator Alan Oxley) and meet local investors.
While Synchron received various Australian government grants, he was unable to get Australian investors on board when the company was in its infancy. “
The feeling was too much risk, too long, too hard. Within six months of being in New York we had our first deal done, and those investors are now close to a 100-times return on that investment that all the Australian VCs passed on,” he says.
... Oxley tells me about his
life-long long obsession with the human brain.
“I fell in love with the brain at school. In 2006, I read about brain-computer interfaces in a
Nature article. That was the moment when I was like holy ****, this is going to be world-changing. I had this excitement bubbling in the back of my head about this new plumbing technique to get to the brain,” he says.
His parents’ globe-trotting careers meant Oxley had lived in Geneva, New York and Singapore while growing up, but the family had settled back in Melbourne where he trained to be a doctor at Monash Medical School.
Before starting studying neurology, Oxley took a year off to go travelling. During that time he landed a meeting with Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist and US Army colonel who was a central figure in the investment the United States was making into brain computer interfaces at a time when the technology was still new.
“I was trying to figure out what PhD I would do, and I just shot out 200 emails randomly to people who looked interesting, and he wrote back to me,” Oxley says. He caught a bus to Washington for the meeting that would change his life.
Oxley’s grandfather was Major-General Sandy Pearson, who commanded Australian Forces during the Vietnam War, and Oxley has been a major in the Australian Army himself. Ling and Oxley bonded over their shared military background, but it was Oxley’s thesis on using a catheter to make brain-computer interface safer and simpler that caught the American’s attention.
Oxley walked away from the meeting with $US1 million in funding. It was a surprise breakthrough that enabled him to return to Melbourne, start his neurology training and set up a laboratory. He co-founded his company with Rahul Sharma, a medical school friend and expert in heart medicine, a field in which the kind of technology Oxley hoped to deploy in the brain – such as catheters – was far more advanced.
“He loved the heart, I love the brain,” Oxley says. “At school we would talk about the explosion in heart technology but with the brain, it was lagging.”
While Oxley was not a professor or a senior academic yet, he had the resources to be his own boss and the support of people such as his PhD supervisor and mentor Terry O’Brien at Melbourne University, who introduced him to the people he needed to get the funding, and Nick Opie, Synchron’s third co-founder. They started hand-building devices that were tested on animals.
The first human trials took place in Melbourne in 2019, followed by six in the United States. A tiny prosthesis called a Stentrode was implanted next to the brain’s motor cortex, enabling the recipients to use vision and the power of direct thought to do daily tasks such as sending emails, conducting online banking and shopping. Unlike Synchron’s competitors, the technology bypasses the need to cut into the skull and insert electrodes directly into the brain.
The device transmits signals wirelessly to a receiver that sits just under the skin in the chest and feeds them into a computer.
A video demonstration released last month shows one of Synchron’s first recipients, a Melbourne man named Rodney who has a neurodegenerative disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), feeding his dog, playing music and turning on a fan and other devices in his home by mentally scrolling through an interface plugged into his brain. Importantly, he can also communicate with his family and others around him.
“When I was an intern I met a father of three who had a stroke and could move his eyes only. I just thought, how can there be no other treatment option here,” Oxley recalls.
..... there is little time to take in the view as he launches into an explanation of how BCI could become as commonplace as the pacemaker in years to come.
If you look at when the car came along and people called it a horseless carriage that was dangerous and unnatural. Then the plane came along, a seemingly crazy thing at the time. I think BCI is going to be in that category,” he says.
“After my presentation, I walked up to Bezos and said, ‘would you invest?’ He said, ‘yes’.”
One scenario is a world where the adoption of BCI becomes as common as LASEK eye surgery to correct vision, and people have satellites in their brains connecting them to AI which can automatically pick up thoughts and complete a user’s to-do list without them being conscious of it.
Oxley says the technology also raises a world of complex ethical issues. “There are major ethical considerations to think about, cognitive sovereignty and cognitive freedom,” he says. Oxley disagrees with a thesis being pushed by Musk and Neuralink that BCIs are critical to help humans align with artificial intelligence by increasing the bandwidth between people and computers.
Oxley says this does not make sense as human cognition still remains biologically constrained and people think at a snail’s pace compared with AI. “AI safety depends on governance and oversight, not plugging into our brains.”
This is all still a long way off and for now, the focus is on the healthcare applications for the technology.
Millions of people globally have some sort of neurological condition that impairs their hands and ability to control a personal device. This includes people with a motor neurone disease, cerebral palsy, stroke or severe arthritis. Morgan Stanley says the total addressable market for the technology is $US400 billion in the United States alone.
Oxley says there are about seven companies, including Musk’s Neuralink, developing BCI, but he wants to be the first to scale it commercially. If he gets it right, he says, the implants could be as scalable as a pacemaker or Cochlear implant.
“It takes 15 years to build an electronics implantable company and there is a feeling that whichever company scales first will have a data ascendancy in the same way that Tesla developed theirs through the use of their AI and their data,” he says.
China is also investing heavily in BCI and there are potential national security issues as some believe it could be used to unlock potential defence applications, such as making fighter jet pilots respond faster.
Synchron’s success will hinge on the crucial next phase of clinical trials, the key to eventually securing FDA approval in what would be one of the biggest developments in med-tech in decades.
Having well-known backers helps. Oxley recalls how nervous he was meeting with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: “I pitched them both. It was very intimidating. At Bezos’ MARS conference, I got invited to present. After my presentation, right before lunch, I walked up to him and said, ‘would you invest?’ He said, ‘yes’.”
We end .... he has an afternoon of investor meetings before heading to Melbourne for the weekend to see relatives and watch a game of footy.
His trip to Australia is relatively short. There is too much to do back in New York. As we wrap up, Oxley explains why he veered off a traditional academic pathway to a corporate one. He realised early on in his career, this was the only way to make a big difference and to see an idea through to commercialisation and have it make an impact on millions of lives.
“My father always had a global mindset and a fascination with the US economy and the US opportunity. So I have always felt that pull to be an entrepreneur. I’ve always been fascinated by the brain, as there was so much to learn.”
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