A brain implant you could get with a shot in your arm

TL;DR: What if getting a brain implant were as easy as rolling up your sleeve? That’s the pitch Deblina Sarkar, an associate professor at MIT and head of its Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek Lab, made at the conference. Her team is developing microscopic chips that could be injected into the bloodstream before making their own way to the brain. For now, the team is targeting brain cancer (and a few other conditions). But the long game? Upgrading healthy humans.

The pitch: Today’s brain implants require drilling a hole in the skull, which comes with risks like infection, plus roughly $100,000 in surgery costs. This means they can reach fewer than 1% of patients, says Sarkar—and exclude particularly vulnerable ones such as children and the elderly. The implanted electrodes can also kill surrounding neurons. Instead, the lab’s chips skip the operating room entirely and are made of biocompatible materials so the neurons stay healthy, per Sarkar—and treatment could cost under $5,000 at scale.

How it works: These chips, which Sarkar says are a billion times smaller than a grain of rice, hitch a ride on cells before implanting themselves in the target area, where they deliver electrical stimulation that is controlled wirelessly. They can also be switched on and off, says Sarkar, or even built to dissolve after days or years.

The short term: The lab has tested the electrical stimulation part of the tech on mice injected with tumors from the tissue of Mayo Clinic patients—and it extended median survival by more than 50%. Beyond brain cancer, the researchers are also targeting Alzheimer’s, chronic pain, and blindness. To get the tech out of the lab, Sarkar founded Cahira Technologies, and expects to start human trials within three years.

A bionic future: Down the line, Sarkar says the chips could be used in healthy people, too—including for health monitoring. Circulating through the body, they could flag anomalies in individual cells (something an MRI can’t see) before they become full-blown diseases.

In theory, the chips could even optimize how your neurons fire and sync, which Sarkar says would have your brain running at its best. And, like popping an SD card into your device for extra storage, you could even add synthetic neurons. “We do not have to be limited by the 100 billion neurons that biology has provided us,” Sarkar tells us. She’s also not ruling out Matrix-style downloads (kung fu, anyone?), but said the tech and our understanding of the brain have a ways to go before that becomes reality.

Bottom line: If this pans out, the most advanced brain tech on the planet could come with the same aftercare as a flu shot: a Band-Aid and maybe even a lollipop. —SM