{"id":15854,"date":"2026-10-02T05:02:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T05:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=15854"},"modified":"2026-10-02T05:02:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T05:02:00","slug":"you-say-ai-i-hear-organoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=15854","title":{"rendered":"You Say \u201cAI,\u201d I Hear \u201cOrganoid\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

I must admit, ever since I learned about, and wrote about (OI May Be the New AI<\/a>), \u201corganoid intelligence\u201d over three years ago, I\u2019ve been looking to do a follow-up. I mean, sure, AI is in a very exciting stage, but that stage no longer seems like the future; it seems more like the present, with implementation issues. It\u2019s data centers, hacking, impacts on jobs, open weight versus closed, and so on. \u00a0It\u2019s market share, IPOs, and AI\u2019s role in driving the stock market. People should certainly pay attention to it, but AI is not quite the open field that it was just a few years ago.<\/p>\n

Organoids, on the other hand, are not quite here yet. They may \u2013 or may not \u2013 be the future of AI, among other things. I always like to look ahead to the next thing more than the at-hand, so when I saw some cool developments with organoids, I didn\u2019t want to miss my chance.<\/p>\n

Making some news last week, researchers at Harvard reported<\/a> that they\u2019d kept lab grown human brain organoids alive for over five years, three times the previous record. Not only that, but the organoids seem to \u201cretain a memory of the time spent in vitro,\u201d recording the passage of time, as it were.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know how far the development and maturation of human brain tissue could occur outside the context of the normal brain inside the head,\u201d said<\/a> Paola Arlotta, Golub Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and senior author of the new paper. \u201cThis work showed that it\u2019s actually possible to not just have these organoids survive in culture, but also continue to change, develop, and mature over stretches of time that had never been reached before.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team observed the organoid cells over the years, and found that they \u201cfaithfully modeled\u201d the ways that human brain cells develop, including DNA methylation, a process in which genes are turned on and off during development, and which serve as a form of \u201cbrain clock.\u201d When older and younger organoid cells were combined in a single organoid, the older cells stuck to the developmental stage they had been at, which researchers concluded meant they \u201crecorded the passage of time and retain a memory of the developmental steps already performed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were a little bit shocked by the results,\u201d Professor Arlotta said. \u201cI like to call this a \u2018time warp\u2019 of development\u00a0\u2014\u00a0they skip ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s obviously hard, and often unethical, to study actual human brain cells, so the researchers believe the organoids offer opportunities for more insights into brain development, as well as for testing drugs or predicting disease progression.<\/p>\n

OK, you might say, that\u2019s all very interesting and some great lab work, but it\u2019s hardly AI, now is it?<\/p>\n

Try this: last week The Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), DayOne, a Singapore-headquartered global data center developer and operator, and Cortical Labs, a Melbourne-based biological computing startup, announced<\/a> they were partnering to form a Biological Data Center Prototype. The Center uses Cortical Labs\u2019 CL1 biological computing system to offer \u201cpractical, sustainability-aligned alternative to conventional silicon infrastructure in Singapore through wetware-based computing.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Cortical Labs claims that its CL1 system is \u201cthe first independently operated biologically integrated server rack in the world.\u201d It uses living neurons ground from stem cells and pairs them with silicon hardware tom process information, but much more efficiently than purely silicon-based processes, making it what is company says is a \u201cmore advanced and sustainable form of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis partnership marks a genuine shift in how we think about computing and its broader scientific potential,\u201d said Professor Rickie Patani, Professor of Neuroscience at NUS Medicine. \u201cBy growing living human neurons from stem cells and pairing them with rigorous engineering, we\u2019re not only building a more efficient alternative to silicon; we\u2019re creating a platform that can help us understand learning and adaptation at their biological source. That dual promise is what makes this collaboration sustainable and scientifically generative. It gives us a real route to accelerate drug discovery and neurological disease research, turning laboratory insight into real-world impact far faster than we could before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hon Weng Chong, founder and CEO of Cortical Labs, added<\/a>: \u201cThe establishment of this prototype shifts the conversation from research to commercial application. Biological computing supplements AI in areas where data is sparse, learning from far less and adapting as conditions change. Our aim is to uncover the use cases where that advantage matters most, in areas such as drug discovery, humanoid robotics, cybersecurity and fraud detection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, that<\/em> sounds more like AI, right?<\/p>\n

Earlier this summer researchers met in Silicon Valley to discuss the convergence of AI and organoids. \u201cUsing AI and human brain organoids together to understand how our brains actually work will give us a much deeper understanding of ourselves,\u201d said<\/a> David Haussler, Scientific Director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. \u201cAnd I want us to really engage with the question of what happens if we succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The session focused largely on the work done by the Braingeneers<\/a>, an interdisciplinary research group at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, UCSF, UCSB, Stanford, and Washington University (St. Louis). For example, the Braingeneers showed an organoid that was learning to play a virtual game, then had a volunteer from the audience try the same, to little success. \u201cThis is just to demonstrate that it is actually a very hard task,\u201d Ash Robbins, a postdoctoral scholar with the Braingeneers who was running the demonstration, said. \u201cThere is no way the organoids are doing it by accident.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Braingeneers ultimately want to create a platform capable of conducting hundreds and soon thousands of organoid experiments in parallel over months. Mr. Robbins has developed BrainDance, an open-source software system that allows other researchers to conduct neural simulation learning experiments for organoids. \u201cThis software makes running really complicated experiments extremely easy. \u201cUsually labs spend years building up all of this kind of software themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, any biologist could download our software very easily and run these types of experiments in just minutes.\u201d The Braingeneers say they are focused on brain research and the treatment of neurological diseases, not AI, but their work could facilitate others\u2019 work in that area.<\/p>\n

As Professor Haussler said: \u201cThis is the beginning of something very big.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

So while much of the world is focused on more and faster chips, crammed with more and more data, I\u2019m going to pay attention to what happens when organoids keep getting smarter.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD I must admit, ever since I learned about, and wrote about (OI May Be the New AI), \u201corganoid intelligence\u201d over three years ago, I\u2019ve been looking to do a follow-up. I mean, sure, AI is in a very exciting stage, but that stage no longer seems like the future; it seems more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}