Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface firm Neuralink announced on Thursday night that it has obtained FDA approval to start conducting human trials. Information of the main step arrives after years of analysis and quite a few regulatory hurdles, in addition to a number of investigations into potential security and animal ethics violations.

“That is the results of unbelievable work by the Neuralink staff in shut collaboration with the FDA and represents an necessary first step that may sooner or later enable our expertise to assist many individuals,” Neuralink wrote via its Twitter account on Thursday night, with Musk retweeting the message alongside his congratulations.

[Related: Elon Musk hopes humans will test Neuralink brain implants in the next six months.]

Neuralink goals to create a line of pc implants that join instantly with customers’ brains, initially with a purpose to restore sufferers’ imaginative and prescient and assist these with a “Stephen Hawking-type [neurological] scenario,” defined Musk throughout a Neuralink presentation final November. For almost all of his life, Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which in the end resulted in a close to complete physique paralysis.

Neuralink first launched footage in 2019 of a profitable interfacing with rat take a look at topics. The corporate subsequently moved on to comparable implants for sheep, pigs, and monkeys. In 2021, the corporate launched footage of one among its take a look at macaques taking part in Pong through a prototype “brain-machine interface.” Late final yr, nevertheless, an exposé from Reuters revealed the corporate was beneath a federal investigation stemming from “inside employees complaints” concerning alleged animal-welfare violations, a few of which pertained to over alleged 1,500 useless take a look at topics. Shortly thereafter, one other report through Reuters indicated the FDA had rebuffed the corporate’s preliminary requests to start human take a look at trials, citing issues over gadgets doubtlessly overheating, in addition to the potential for damaging mind tissue upon implant elimination.

[Related: Employees say Neuralink’s ‘hack job’ tests killed roughly 1,500 animals since 2018.]

As The Verge and DigitalTrends famous on Thursday, Neuralink will not be the primary firm to obtain regulatory greenlight on human brain-computer interface trials. Earlier this yr, an organization referred to as Synchron—backed by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Invoice Gates—introduced it had efficiently implanted their “Stentrode” neuroprosthesis machine in 4 human topics. BrainGate’s machine has additionally beforehand allowed a paralyzed man to transform his imagined handwriting into textual content to speak.

Per Neuralink, recruitment will not be but open for medical trials, however the firm promised “extra info on this quickly.” Final November, Musk acknowledged throughout an organization show-and-tell that “You could possibly have a Neuralink machine implanted proper now and also you wouldn’t even know,” including that, “ Hypothetically in one among these demos, in truth… I’ll.”