From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak

Summary

Max Hodak makes the case that the brain is best understood as a computer with limited external “wires,” and that medical progress will come faster by building interfaces to those channels than by waiting on traditional biology. He walks through Science’s Prima retinal prosthesis: a chip implanted under the retina, paired with glasses that project a laser image onto the implant to stimulate the retina directly and bypass dead rods and cones. Hodak says the system has already restored practical form vision in clinical trials, though it remains limited by a narrow field of view and black-and-white output, with grayscale and color as the next engineering targets. He also discusses Science’s broader pipeline—vision, biohybrid neural interfaces, and perfusion medicine—and argues that connectomics and AI-neuroscience alignment could help reveal the brain’s underlying representational structure. The long-run thesis is that these tools can reduce human fragility, repair broken function, and eventually expand what people can do.

Notes

• Hodak frames the brain as a computer and the skull as a bounded interface to the world.
• Science describes itself as a medical device company using a differentiated understanding of the brain to improve human condition.
• Prima is positioned as a retinal prosthesis, analogous to a cochlear implant for the eye.
• The implant is a tiny chip placed under the retina for patients who lost light-sensitive cells.
• Glasses with a laser projector send an image onto the implant to stimulate the retina directly.
• Science explored gene therapy, electrical stimulation, ultrasound, LGN stimulation, and V1 stimulation before settling on its retinal path.
• Pixium was acquired because it had the leading retinal prosthesis technology in late 2022.
• Prima received European marketing approval in July and first commercial sales were expected within weeks.
• Hodak casts the moonshot analogy as evidence that hard-tech bets can work.
• Science’s pipeline has three pillars: vision, biohybrid neural interfaces, and perfusion medicine.
• He gives the combined platform a 10–15 year horizon for major medical impact.
• The current retinal prosthesis is a proof of concept for form vision restoration.
• The system still has a small field of view, like looking through a straw.
• The first version is black-and-white only, so grayscale is the immediate next step.
• Science believes it can eventually add at least red and green color, with blue harder.
• Clinical trial patients reportedly solved Sudoku and crossword puzzles and some read books.
• He treats those outcomes as an existence proof that a previously impossible result was achieved.
• The company’s broader thesis is to reduce human fragility by repairing or replacing key biological subsystems.
• He says the optic and vestibulocochlear nerves illustrate how few channels mediate major senses.
• If vision, hearing, balance, and basic motor signals can be restored, that is a sufficient BCI objective.
• Hodak thinks cardiovascular disease and non-brain-metastatic cancer are attackable through this platform.
• He defines BCI broadly, but says Science is not focused on a narrow brain-keyboard product.
• He cites a 10 bits-per-second cognitive bottleneck as part of that framing.
• Science sees value in alignments between animal neural recordings and AI model internal representations.
• He links the Platonic representation hypothesis to practical neuroscience work at Science.
• He says the representational structure may be global or local, and the answer remains uncertain.
• Connectomics is a key missing piece, and a mouse connectome may be near feasible.
• He says the visual cortex is a major structure that sits at the back of the brain.
• He contrasts sensory restoration with language-only or communication-only neural devices.
• He suggests a kilobit-per-second control channel can put humans halfway to the Matrix.
• The company already has a next version in animal studies that could enter humans next year and reach millions.
• The first version aims at hundreds of thousands of patients in the US and Europe.
• Science views vision restoration as a large market because blindness is highly debilitating in an older population.
• He points to established reimbursement economics in vision as support for the business case.
• He contrasts modest measured gains with very high reimbursement for narrow eye therapies.
• He argues that AI model representations and neuroscience concepts have very similar geometry.
• The mission extends to substrate independence, not just symptom relief.