Science acquired the implant in 2024 from French startup Pixium Vision, which was facing bankruptcy, and has leapfrogged ahead of Elon Musk’s Neuralink to develop an implant for vision loss. Hodak cofounded Neuralink along with Musk and others in 2016 but left in 2021 to start Science and serve as its CEO. Hodak was inspired to work on organ preservation after reading about the case of a 17-year-old boy in Boston whose lungs had failed due to cystic fibrosis. He was being sustained by a type of perfusion called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, while awaiting a transplant. Used during the Covid-19 pandemic for patients whose lungs had failed, ECMO machines are expensive and highly resource-intensive.