Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface firm Neuralink announced on Thursday night that it has acquired FDA approval to start conducting human trials. Information of the key 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 unimaginable work by the Neuralink workforce in shut collaboration with the FDA and represents an vital first step that may someday permit our know-how 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 laptop implants that join straight with customers’ brains, initially in an effort 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 finally resulted in a close to complete physique paralysis.

Neuralink first launched footage in 2019 of a profitable interfacing with rat check topics. The corporate subsequently moved on to comparable implants for sheep, pigs, and monkeys. In 2021, the corporate launched footage of one in every of its check macaques enjoying Pong by way of a prototype “brain-machine interface.” Late final yr, nonetheless, an exposé from Reuters revealed the corporate was underneath a federal investigation stemming from “inner workers complaints” relating to alleged animal-welfare violations, a few of which pertained to over alleged 1,500 useless check topics. Shortly thereafter, one other report by way of Reuters indicated the FDA had rebuffed the corporate’s preliminary requests to start human check trials, citing considerations over units probably overheating, in addition to the opportunity of damaging mind tissue upon implant removing.

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

As The Verge and DigitalTrends famous on Thursday, Neuralink is just not the primary firm to obtain regulatory greenlight on human brain-computer interface trials. Earlier this yr, an organization known 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 is just not but open for medical trials, however the firm promised “extra data on this quickly.” Final November, Musk said throughout an organization show-and-tell that “You may have a Neuralink machine implanted proper now and also you wouldn’t even know,” including that, “ Hypothetically in one in every of these demos, in reality… I’ll.”