--- title: Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine | TIME description: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 200 million people worldwide. It results from the breakdown of retinal cells, particularly in the macula, the part of the retina responsible for central vision. Although AMD doesn’t usually cause total blindness, it can severely impair vision. Currently, there’s no cure, but Science Corp., a four-year-old neuroscience company led by biomedical engineer Max Hodak, is developing an experimental procedure called Prima to address it. canonical: https://time.com/video/3n2nkgWm/ og:title: Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine og:description: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 200 million people worldwide. It results from the breakdown of retinal cells, particularly in the macula, the part of the retina responsible for central vision. Although AMD doesn’t usually cause total blindness, it can severely impair vision. Currently, there’s no cure, but Science Corp., a four-year-old neuroscience company led by biomedical engineer Max Hodak, is developing an experimental procedure called Prima to address it. og:url: https://time.com/video/3n2nkgWm/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/3n2nkgWm/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine twitter:description: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 200 million people worldwide. It results from the breakdown of retinal cells, particularly in the macula, the part of the retina responsible for central vision. Although AMD doesn’t usually cause total blindness, it can severely impair vision. Currently, there’s no cure, but Science Corp., a four-year-old neuroscience company led by biomedical engineer Max Hodak, is developing an experimental procedure called Prima to address it. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/3n2nkgWm/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=c14331b2-eaca-4e0a-8b98-fe3c77b51647&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=c14331b2-eaca-4e0a-8b98-fe3c77b51647&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine [Watch (HLS stream): Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/3n2nkgWm.m3u8) (4:34)  _Published 2025-11-06. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 200 million people worldwide. It results from the breakdown of retinal cells, particularly in the macula, the part of the retina responsible for central vision. Although AMD doesn’t usually cause total blindness, it can severely impair vision. Currently, there’s no cure, but Science Corp., a four-year-old neuroscience company led by biomedical engineer Max Hodak, is developing an experimental procedure called Prima to address it._ --- Sep 24, 2026 9:20 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Dolly Parton Reflects on Her Legacy in 2020 TIME Interview](/video/HBGENzJ2/) ### Dolly Parton Reflects on Her Legacy in 2020 TIME Interview [Dolly Parton: How She Makes a Livin' MONEY](/video/mPmObPqw/) ### Dolly Parton: How She Makes a Livin' MONEY [SOUTHPAW - -You Can't Fight Like That Anymore-' - The Weinstein Company](/video/EQjDWoRC/) ### SOUTHPAW - -You Can't Fight Like That Anymore-' - The Weinstein Company --- ## Transcript Max Hodak is part of a new generation of scientists and engineers who are developing technology to put computers inside human brains and bodies. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and Hodak actually does reference James Cameron's Avatar movies a lot. We'd like to talk to you about a fresh start on a new world. In those films, humans use a brain computer interface, or BCI, to control the physical bodies of an avatar on an alien planet. But BCI is increasingly the stuff of real life, too. I've spent most of my life trying to think solve the answer to the question what are the ultimate brain computer interface technologies that will get us to some of these science fiction promised lands? I visited Hodak at his San Francisco based company, Science Corporation, where he showed me the technology behind an experimental procedure called prima, which uses a tiny computer chip to cure blindness. So this is chip design, and we're walking over to where the electrical engineers are. Actually, we can go over here. Prima is a tiny chip implanted in the back of the eye. So in the retina, there's really three layers of cells. There's the rods and cones, the light sensitive cells that turn incoming light into ion flows. Those connect to about 100 million bipolar cells. They connect the rods and cones to the optic nerve, and that compresses down to about 1.5 million optic nerve cells. Science Corporation is working to cure diseases like age related macular degeneration, or AMD, which affects nearly 200 million people around the world. And so, in diseases where the patient's rods and cones have atrophied or died, prima is a chip that's implanted at the layer where the rods and cones were, and it's covered in all these little hex grids that convert incoming light into energy to create an electric field. So it replaces the dead biological photoreceptors with this electronic device. Hodak showed me how Prima's implanted chip works in conjunction with a pair of glasses. The glasses have a camera looking out at the world, but it converts it into an infrared laser projection that is projected into the eye. That works basically like an overhead projection in an office room. In a recent clinical trial of 35 patients, 80% showed improvement in vision after getting the Prima primo procedure. Alice Charton is a patient in the study. I spoke to her over video conferencing from her doctor's office in Paris. L'Espoir. Qu'on est qu'on peut plus dramatique. Pour moi. C'était dramatique et grace a system. Je peux moment un livre au system peut faire magic. I was sitting with a patient a couple of months ago and watching them read a newspaper, and it's to be clear, it's halting. It's not not totally fluent. There's definitely ways to make this better. But this is a patient who can't recognize faces, who is very profoundly blind. And before this, there is never nobody's ever directly stimulated a cell other than the rods and cones and gotten what we call a form vision image, this coherent, uh, scene in the mind's eye. Prima is currently in the beta stage, not yet ready for wide release. The prima glasses rely on a bulky £2 plastic module or brick that houses the processing computer, which is heavy and it tends to get hot. How far away are you from being able to do away with the brick? So the new version of the glasses. So this. Yeah, the PCBs, the electronics that are in here completely replace the brick. I see. So by next spring, the brick will be gone. Hudak says Science Corporation is also working on a Biohybrid model, a computer chip seeded with stem cells that can grow into brain tissue and form useful connections with neurons that govern thought, speech, creativity and more. It would, for example, allow you to just think of pressing a button or moving a joystick, and that would happen on its own. There are hundreds of companies working on BCI technology today. It's expected to become a $6.2 billion business sector by 2030, taking us one step closer to a future in which the differences between humans and computers are less and less distinguishable. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Computer Chips Could Be the Future of Medicine","description":"Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affects about 200 million people worldwide. It results from the breakdown of retinal cells, particularly in the macula, the part of the retina responsible for central vision. Although AMD doesn’t usually cause total blindness, it can severely impair vision. 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