Computing on the Brain Small Spheres of Neurons show Promise for Drug Testing and Computation

Sounds a remarkable step.

Organoid Intelligence: Computing on the Brain Small spheres of neurons show promise for drug testing and computation    By Michael Nolan

In parallel to recent developments in machine learning like GPT-4, a group of scientists has recently proposed the use of neural tissue itself, carefully grown to recreate the structures of the animal brain, as a computational substrate. After all, if AI is inspired by neurological systems, what better medium to do computing than an actual neurological system? Gathering developments from the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, neurobiology, electrophysiology, and pharmacology, the authors propose a new research initiative they call “organoid intelligence.”

OI is a collective effort to promote the use of brain organoids—tiny spherical masses of brain tissue grown from stem cells—for computation, drug research and as a model to study at a small scale how a complete brain may function. In other words, organoids provide an opportunity to better understand the brain, and OI aims to use that knowledge to develop neurobiological computational systems that learn from less data and with less energy than silicon hardware.

The development of organoids has been made possible by two bioengineering breakthroughs: induced pluripotent stem cells and 3D cell culturing techniques.

Taking the existing field of neuromorphic computing, where the structure of neurons and the connections between them are studied and mimicked in silicon architectures, OI extends the engineering analogy with the opportunity to directly program desired behaviors into the firing activity of animal brain cell cultures.

Organoids typically measure 500 microns in diameter—roughly the thickness of your fingernail. As organoids develop, the researchers say, organoids’ constituent neurons begin to interconnect in networks and patterns of activity that mimic the structures of different brain regions. The development of the organoids field has been made possible by two bioengineering breakthroughs: induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) and 3D cell culturing techniques. IPSCs are stem cells–notably capable of developing into any cell found in an animal’s body–that are created by turning an adult cell back into the stem cell.

 These induced stem cells are then biochemically coaxed into the specific neurons and glia needed to construct a given organoid. More recently developed 3D-scaffolding methods allow biologists to grow iPSC-derived neural tissues vertically as well as horizontally, allowing organoids to develop the interneuronal networks seen in an animal’s brain. Scientists have studied 2D-cultures for decades, but monolayer tissues are not able to grow into brain-like networks in the ways the organoids can .... '