TECH NEWS – No, not Valve. We’re talking about another company founded by Gabe Newell in 2019.

It has come to light that Valve boss Gabe Newell is also the co-founder of Starfish, a neuroscience company working on a broad range of foundational technologies to enable new ways of interacting with the brain. If all goes as planned, the first neural interface chip could reach the market by the end of 2025. Brain interfaces are not a new area of interest for Newell: in 2021, he delved into the gaming potential of brain-computer interface technology and had already discussed biometric interfaces as early as 2010. According to The Verge, Starfish Neuroscience launched in 2019 and stayed quiet until last week, when it released its first (and so far only) blog post offering a glimpse of the company’s mission. Unlike others in the field, Starfish is taking a different approach, as explained by neuroengineer Nate Cermak.

“Existing approaches to interfacing with the brain predominantly focus on interacting with a single brain region. For example, deep brain stimulation is used to treat Parkinson’s disease. However, there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated. Developing therapies for those disorders will require distributed neural interfaces capable of interacting with the brain at the circuit level, i.e., reading and writing to multiple connected parts of the brain simultaneously. We anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025, and we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues. At this early stage, we’re especially interested in collaborating with those whose existing work in fields such as wireless power delivery and communication would pair well with this technology, as well as with those designing custom implanted neural interfaces,” Cermak wrote.

Current technology is not yet up to the task for reasons including size and power demands, so Starfish hopes to fill that gap. The company is developing a new class of minimally invasive, distributed neural interfaces that would allow simultaneous access to multiple brain regions. The work is still in early stages, but progress appears promising.

Starfish has also developed a targeted hyperthermic device that could be used in cancer treatment, and it is researching transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies for treating a range of neurological disorders…

Source : PCGamer, The Verge, Starfish