AMD patients are reading letters again as PRIMA lands its CE mark in Europe

By Inside BCI · July 22, 2026

Sometime before he acquired the technology in April 2024, Max Hodak sat down and watched a video of a blind patient reading. He wrote about the moment on his own blog in 2024, when Science Corporation, the neural engineering company he founded in Alameda, California, in April 2021 after leaving his role as president of Neuralink, bought PRIMA out of the receivership of a Paris-based bioelectronic firm called Pixium Vision. Hodak’s line was that previous attempts at restoring vision through electrically stimulating the retina had produced only phosphenes, fleeting flashes of light that a field of them was not really vision. What he saw on the video was different. The patient was reading. On Wednesday 22 July 2026, Science Corporation announced that the two-millimetre subretinal photovoltaic chip on that video, PRIMA, has received a CE mark under the European Union Medical Device Regulation from the notified body DEKRA, is commercially available across thirty European countries, and will be implanted for the first time on a paying commercial basis in Germany in the coming weeks.

The German patient’s identity is not on the record. Neither are the names of the thirty-eight participants of the pivotal PRIMAvera trial across seventeen European clinical sites in five countries whose data underlie the approval, though one of them gained fifty-nine letters on a standard ETDRS eye chart, more than eleven lines. Eighty-four per cent of the cohort reported reading letters, numbers, and words at home after the implant. Eighty per cent achieved a prosthetic visual acuity gain of at least 0.2 logMAR (about ten letters) at twelve months, with a statistical significance below one part in a thousand. The mean gain across the trial was 25.5 letters, more than five lines, without any decline in the mean of what natural vision the participants had retained. The primary paper (Holz, Le Mer, Muqit, Sahel and colleagues) appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2026 (394:232-242, DOI 10.1056/NEJMoa2501396) and made the cover of Time. The device is the first retinal implant of any kind to receive a European market authorisation for restoring central vision in a disease that mostly appears after the age of fifty and mostly progresses toward legal blindness.

What PRIMA actually is, and what “form vision” actually means

The chip is two millimetres on each side, thirty micrometres thick, and carries 378 photovoltaic pixels. It sits underneath the atrophic macula, wireless, without a battery. The patient wears a pair of augmented-reality glasses that carry a camera on the frame. The camera captures the visual scene, processes it, and projects a near-infrared image directly through the pupil onto the surface of the implant. Each pixel converts the incoming light into a small electrical stimulus that acts on the residual bipolar cells of the retinal circuit above it. The visual pathway from bipolar cell to ganglion cell to optic nerve to visual cortex is otherwise intact in geographic atrophy: what has died is the outer photoreceptor layer, the rods and cones. PRIMA replaces the dead photoreceptors with something the surviving inner retina can still interpret.

The distinction between phosphene perception and form vision is important because it defines what PRIMA delivers that previous retinal implants did not. Second Sight’s Argus II, which received a CE mark in 2011 and an FDA Humanitarian Device Exemption in 2013 for retinitis pigmentosa, delivered flashes of light and rough shape detection; some patients could identify letters with concentration at long presentation times. Retina Implant AG’s Alpha IMS and Alpha AMS, which took CE marks in 2013 and 2016 for the same disease, produced spontaneous letter reading in three of twenty-nine subjects. Both companies wound down by 2019. Neither device was ever indicated for age-related macular degeneration, which is a fundamentally different clinical population; both were sub-legal in acuity restoration for most participants; and neither of the two products remains commercially available. The pharmaceutical treatments now approved for geographic atrophy in the United States, Apellis’s Syfovre (pegcetacoplan) since February 2023 and Astellas’s Izervay (avacincaptad pegol) since August 2023, slow the rate of geographic atrophy lesion growth but do not restore any vision that has already been lost. Daniel Palanker at Stanford, the physicist who invented the PRIMA photovoltaic architecture, has been clear on the honest superlative: all previous attempts at prosthetic vision resulted in light sensitivity, not form vision, and PRIMA is the first to provide the latter. That claim carries scrutiny.

The claim that Inside BCI is not making, which some of the wire coverage on Wednesday made, is that PRIMA is the world’s second commercial brain-computer interface after the Neuracle NEO commercial implant that landed at Shanghai Huashan Hospital on 13 July. Both are commercial neural implants, and both received their respective national or supranational regulatory approvals in 2026. The Neuracle NEO reads intent from the surface of the motor cortex to drive a paralysed hand to open. PRIMA delivers structured light through 378 pixels to the surviving inner retina to give a person their central vision back. They are the first two 2026 commercial neural implants from their respective regulatory jurisdictions, and they answer to different bodies of law, but Argus II and Alpha AMS existed as commercial retinal implants a decade earlier and would need to be counted first under any consistent taxonomy of implanted commercial neural interfaces. The narrower claim that PRIMA is the first commercially cleared retinal implant to restore central vision in geographic atrophy from AMD is the one that survives.

The company, the founder, and the second ex-Neuralink founder story of the week

Science Corporation is roughly four years old and, by the count of Tracxn as of April 2026, has around two hundred and ninety employees. Its headquarters is in Alameda, California, with additional presences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and in Paris, France. The Paris office came with the PRIMA acquisition and provides continuity for the ophthalmic clinical operations that Pixium had been running there. Total capital raised since founding is approximately US$490 million, most recently a $230 million oversubscribed Series C that closed on 5 March 2026 with continued participation from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Y Combinator, IQT and Quiet Capital. Bloomberg has reported a post-money valuation of approximately US$1.5 billion; Science Corporation itself has not disclosed that figure. The executive team includes co-founder and Chief Science Officer Alan Mardinly (a Neuralink alumnus from 2019 to 2021 who followed Hodak out), Chief Strategy Officer Darius Shahida from Butterfly Network (effective 5 January 2026), and Medical Director for Brain-Computer Interfaces Murat Günel (appointed 31 March 2026).

Max Hodak’s own arc is the specific pattern that this week has brought back into visible relief. He holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Engineering from Duke (2012), where he worked in Miguel Nicolelis’s laboratory on primate brain-computer interfaces. He founded Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory, in February 2012; it merged with 3Scan in 2019 to form Strateos. He co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk in 2016 and served as its president through early 2021. His departure, announced by his own tweet on 1 May 2021 (“Some personal news: I am no longer at Neuralink”), preceded a Fortune investigation in January 2022 that framed the exit against a backdrop of managerial tension. He founded Science Corporation the same month he announced the departure, April 2021, with an explicit thesis that engaging directly with the nervous system as an information-processing system produces effect sizes classical medicine cannot reach. His company’s public product lines now include PRIMA on the ophthalmic side, a biohybrid organic neural interface in development, a Vessel perfusion programme, the Lightsheet optogenetic vision-restoration approach that Science had been building before it acquired PRIMA, and a foundry-and-tools ecosystem (SciFi Headstage, Synapse Protocol, Axon Probes, Nexus software, NYX and LUX chips, and contract MEMS fabrication).

Hodak is now the second ex-Neuralink founding-team member to reach a major public product milestone within twenty-four hours. Ben Rapoport, another of the eight founding members of Neuralink and now Chief Science Officer at New York-based Precision Neuroscience, released video on Tuesday 21 July of non-paralysed neurosurgical patients playing Mario Kart, Fruit Ninja and Pong through Precision’s Layer 7 surface array. Rapoport left Neuralink in 2018 to build against Neuralink’s threads-into-cortex thesis with a non-penetrating surface array. Hodak left in 2021 to build against it with everything from a photovoltaic retinal chip to a biohybrid organic interface. The two founders’ bets diverge structurally, sit within roughly the same funding tier ($180 million cumulative at Precision, $490 million at Science), and have hit consecutive milestones this week. The industry read on that pattern, taken together with Neuralink’s own N1 rollout and Paradromics’ first Michigan implant, is not that Neuralink is losing so much as that the ex-Neuralink diaspora has become one of the most productive founding pools in the current brain-computer interface field.

Where PRIMA came from

Pixium Vision was founded in Paris in November 2011 by Bernard Gilly and José-Alain Sahel as a spin-out from the Institut de la Vision at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Sahel is now Distinguished Professor and Chair of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Director of the UPMC Vision Institute. He moved to Pittsburgh in 2016 while continuing an association with the Sorbonne. He is the senior author on the New England Journal of Medicine PRIMA paper. Frank Holz, Chair of Ophthalmology at the University Hospital of Bonn, is the lead author and the trial’s scientific coordinator. Mahi Muqit, vitreoretinal surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, is one of the trial’s surgical leads and the source of the on-record line most worth quoting on the clinical significance: “Blind patients are actually able to have meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before.” Palanker at Stanford, the physicist who conceived the photovoltaic-pixel approach in the early 2010s, is Sahel’s oldest collaborator on the programme and the source of the technical claim that PRIMA delivers form vision rather than phosphenes.

The Paris Commercial Court placed Pixium into judicial liquidation in 2024. Science Corporation acquired the assets, IP and three ongoing clinical trials (including the pivotal PRIMAvera study, registered as ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04676854 with a 38-patient European enrolment) in a bid that also cleared French Foreign Direct Investment approval. Hodak’s own announcement of the acquisition, dated 25 April 2024, ran on Science’s website and named some of the Pixium team members who came across (Ralf, Karine, Brian, Alexandra, Offer and Lloyd, in the first names Hodak used publicly). Financial terms have not been disclosed. The Wednesday 22 July 2026 CE-mark announcement was accompanied by a second Science Corporation release the same day announcing that the US Food and Drug Administration has granted PRIMA Humanitarian Use Device designation. The device already held FDA Breakthrough Device designation, awarded in April 2023 while still at Pixium. STAT’s coverage of Wednesday’s announcement framed the eventual United States launch as targeted for 2027.

What to watch

Watch the German reimbursement decision. The CE mark authorises commercial availability across thirty European Union member states, but reimbursement is set country by country. Germany is the first market where a commercial implant will happen, and whether the German statutory health insurance system agrees to reimburse the device at a price that supports adoption is the specific signal that determines whether the CE mark converts to real-world use across Europe. If the first commercial implants in Germany land under a private-pay or supplementary-insurance arrangement rather than a full statutory reimbursement, the European launch will be materially narrower than the thirty-country footprint implies.

Watch the US Humanitarian Use Device pathway. The FDA’s Humanitarian Device Exemption approval that would allow US commercial distribution runs through a distinct clinical-evidence bar and a maximum-population cap. Argus II reached the US market by this route in 2013. Whether Science Corporation can pull PRIMA through HDE approval in 2027 as STAT is reporting, or whether the regulatory step slips to 2028, is the operational milestone that determines whether the four-year gap between Palanker’s PRIMAvera pivotal and US patients getting central vision restored gets any shorter.

Watch what the two ex-Neuralink diaspora companies do next. Precision Neuroscience has an Early Feasibility Study for a chronic Layer 7 implant targeted for early 2028. Science Corporation has PRIMA now commercial in Europe and a biohybrid organic neural interface in development. Neuralink itself has an N1 cohort continuing to scale. Whether Musk’s original team or the founders who left it produces the specific next commercial milestone is now genuinely uncertain. It has not been that in the past decade.

Watch the AMD-specific competitive space. Syfovre and Izervay slow geographic atrophy; PRIMA restores central vision in patients whose atrophy has already progressed to central visual loss. The two categories may become sequential rather than competing: complement inhibitors early in the disease, PRIMA later once the atrophic damage has crossed the fovea. If the ophthalmology community adopts that sequencing, PRIMA’s addressable market moves from a niche late-stage rescue into a substantial share of the roughly five million patients globally with advanced dry AMD.

Sources

news Science-Corporation PRIMA Max-Hodak Frank-Holz Jose-Alain-Sahel Daniel-Palanker geographic-atrophy age-related-macular-degeneration AMD retinal-implant subretinal-photovoltaic CE-mark EU-MDR DEKRA Pixium-Vision Alan-Mardinly Ben-Rapoport Precision-Neuroscience State-Patchwork-posture Horizontal-Regulator-posture

What PRIMA actually is, and what “form vision” actually means

The company, the founder, and the second ex-Neuralink founder story of the week

Where PRIMA came from

What to watch

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