Valve co-founder and gaming industry icon Gabe Newell is looking to broaden his reach outside of Steam and "Half-Life." Few people are aware that he is also one of the founders of Starfish Neuroscience, a firm with an ambitious vision to change the way we communicate with the brain using advanced neural interface technologies.
As per Newell, the firm has plans to launch its first neural chip by late 2025. Will this be an upcoming competitor for Elon Musk's Neuralink?
Starfish Neuroscience Revealed
Although the majority of game enthusiasts recognize Newell for revolutionizing PC gaming, his decade-long interest in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has been developing in secret as a high-risk tech startup. As reported by The Verge, Starfish Neuroscience was established in 2019, but just recently came out of stealth with its initial official blog posting.
Whereas other firms, such as Neuralink, are pursuing a fundamentally different avenue, Starfish is targeting circuit-level dysfunction of multiple brain areas that is common across many neurological ailments.
Tech, which can read and write to multiple brain areas at the same time, is what Starfish is working on, explains neuroengineer Nate Cermak, which is something that existing neural implants can't do yet.
Breaking Past Current Limitations in Neural Technology
BCIs today have several challenges: they're big, energy-intensive, and need very invasive surgery. Starfish's vision is to provide minimally invasive, distributed neural interfaces that allow multi-region communication in the brain, without having a heavy "surgical burden" on patients.
According to PC Gamer, the aim is to make these chips not just intelligent but safer and more affordable.
Cermark explained that the company is now looking for collaborators in certain areas, such as neuro-interface engineering and wireless power transmission, to bring their first chips in December.
This technical jump may make available new therapies for difficult neurological diseases like Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and depression, where impairment pervades whole neural circuits instead of discrete brain regions.
New Therapies Beyond Neural Chips
Starfish Neuroscience isn't content with brain chips. The firm is working on a targeted hyperthermia device, a technology that employs localized heat for future cancer therapy. It's also looking into transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as a non-surgical approach to treating all sorts of brain maladies.
These milestones suggest that Starfish is not simply another BCI startup—it's emerging as a multi-sided neuroscience company with aspirations in healthcare and cognitive tech.
As for whether it can compete with Neuralink or not, it will take some time before we see how Starfish's neural chips fare in the market. It's too early to say that Neuralink is the better company when what they are focusing on is different from one another.
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