Science

Durham County Commissioners Unanimously Approve Incentives for Science Foundry Expansion A Note from the Lead of Science Foundry, Kara Zappitelli: Our plan is to invest up to $65 million in a 57,000 square foot expansion at our Durham County location to support MEMS and semiconductor manufacturing. Our investment and expansion will be facilitated, in part, by a $930,000 ten-year performance-based incentive award unanimously approved yesterday by the Durham County Board of Commissioners. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gepW2STv

At Science, we prioritize collaborating with the community to help accelerate progress in neural engineering, so today we're making our Nixel 512 and Pixel 2K & 16K chips for neural stim and record available to others. Excited to see how they get used! https://lnkd.in/gUR77yFY

"It’s this type of data that convinced us...this should get to patients." said Max Hodak, CEO of Science. Read more about Science's newest visual prosthesis and our plans for its future. https://lnkd.in/dSHgEAsW

📉 From Collapse to Comeback, from Bankruptcy to Buyout: https://lnkd.in/eq_YEF_f 📈 ✍️Thank you Michael Beyeler and your team at UC Santa Barbara for sharing our improbable story at Pixium Vision S.A.

Science Corporation Acquires Pixium’s Prima Retinal Implant A note from our CEO, Max Hodak: I had the opportunity to see something incredible a few months ago: a video of a blind patient reading. There have been many attempts at restoring vision by electrically stimulating the retina, but those devices could only cause fleeting flashes of light called phosphenes. With more electrodes you might get more phosphenes, but I (and many others) have always had the concern that a field of phosphenes is not really vision. Indeed: earlier patients might be able to reason their way through piecing lines into letters, but they weren’t able to intuitively string them together into words, much less words into sentences. Pixium’s PRIMA implant is, to my knowledge, the first really definitive demonstration of what researchers call “form vision” (the ability to recognize visual elements as parts of a larger object) in humans. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g3CjYXyT

The Washington Post spotlighted Science and the Science Eye in their Innovations series. Read more about how this cutting-edge visual prosthesis that targets serious forms of blindness like retinitis pigmentosa combines an optogenetic gene therapy with an ultra dense µLED display. https://lnkd.in/gzdcAQ9z

Science CEO Max Hodak headlined the two-day START Global Conference in Switzerland late last month. His keynote conversation,  Engineering the Brain, drew many of the 7,000 attendees. Summit participants came from over 850 technology startups and 1,000 global investors. It focused on the next generation of entrepreneurs and the kinds of issues they encounter. The discussion included the future of Science, restoring vision to the blind, and what is possible beyond that. Talking about the Science Eye, Max said, “If all we ever really do as a company is restore sight to the blind, that is a major thing.” but continued more generally about the future promise of neural engineering, “when you see that it is possible that it could work in our lifetime, …it is such a transcendent goal.” Adding, “The odds that the future will be very exciting are very high.” Watch the full discussion on Vimeo: https://lnkd.in/g2wE26cu