Would you let Elon Musk put an implant in your brain? If that's your dream, then you'll be thrilled to hear that it's one step closer to reality — as Elon Musk's company Neuralink has just posted a job opening looking for a clinical trials manager.
See also: Elon Musk: SpaceX will land humans on Mars within 5 to 10 years
Having previously demonstrated its brain-machine interfaces in animals, this new director will be responsible for “collaborating with Neuralink’s first clinical trial participants” – that is, the first people on whom Neuralink will test its technology.
This study is a necessary next step if Neuralink wants to achieve Musk's goals for the technology - to become a recognized treatment for neurological problems and facilitate communication between computers and the brain.
See also: Elon Musk: I will pay over $11 billion in taxes this year
To receive approval from agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration – and therefore be allowed to be sold as an official medical device – Neuralink will need to show that its implants provide a substantial improvement over existing options and that any risks of using them are far outweighed by the benefits.
However, if you're not selected for one of these studies, you likely won't be able to use a Neuralink device right away. Each study would likely last at least a year — and that's not counting the time spent developing the study and analyzing the results.
And while governing bodies may accept results from a single clinical trial in situations where no other treatment is available – the nature of Neuralink’s implants will likely force them to maintain the usual rule of at least two trials.
Assuming Neuralink will want to fully analyze the trial before developing a follow-up, we assume that at best it will take at least five years for approval.
See also: Elon Musk: Tesla will invest $10 billion in Gigafactory Texas
But the work won't stop there. In order to conduct "well-designed clinical trials" – as the FDA puts it – Neuralink will likely need to conduct separate studies for each condition it wants to treat.
This would reduce the risk of Neuralink trying to circumvent its results using practices like p-hacking (the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant).
Information source: techradar.com
