Neuralink Cancels Second Implant Surgery Due to Medical Issues

Neuralink has canceled its second human implantation surgery after discovering additional medical issues in the patient who was going to get the brain chip.

As Bloomberg reports, the unnamed candidate suffers from the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Though the exact medical issues weren’t disclosed due to patient confidentiality laws, the CEO of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix — which the Elon Musk-owned company also used for its first implantation — said that it made the candidate unsuitable for this second human trial.

“Selecting the right patient for a trial like this is important,” Michael Lawton, the CEO of the Barrow facility, told Bloomberg. “Everybody involved, clinically and surgically, wants to get it right.”

Though Musk has talked a big talk about getting his own Neuralink chip implanted, the company is currently focusing on people who suffer from conditions that can lead to motor skills and even paralysis. Its first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, became paralyzed in all four of his limbs during a diving accident in 2016.

Lawton told Bloomberg that a replacement candidate is likely to undergo surgery to implant the brain chip next month, though he didn’t add any more information about who that candidate may be or what condition they may have.

Notably, Neuralink itself has not made any statement about the surgery cancellation or responded to press requests from either Bloomberg or Futurism. Neither has Musk, though he did retweet a video interview with Arbaugh after news broke about the second implantation being canceled.

This setback in human trials is just the latest in a string of mixed news for the company after reports began indicating that the 29-year-old quadriplegic’s implant was already starting to lose functionality just a few months after it was implanted at the beginning of 2024. The issue with that first implant was related to how deep the threads inside the quarter-sized chip went into Arbaugh’s brain, and the company has admitted that it knew it might start to malfunction and went ahead with the surgery anyway.

There’s still a lot that’s unclear about Neuralink’s next surgery, but we do know that the company plans to jam wires even deeper into their brain than with Arbaugh — a gruesome prospect, especially considering what happened to all those Neuralink lab monkeys just a few years ago.

More on Neuralink: First Neuralink Patient Says Implant Has Given Him Incredible Gaming Skills