Does the future of digital healthcare lie with biocomputers powered by engineered cultures derived from human brain cells? If so, it’s already underway in Baltimore.
There, at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, scientists from across a broad swath of disciplines are collaborating with bioethicists and other key stakeholders to propel an emerging field the project’s leaders are calling organoid intelligence—or “OI.”
Organoids are lab-grown packets of tissue that, in research, stand in for the complete organ from which they originated. The Johns Hopkins work in the field is described in a paper published Feb. 27 in Frontiers in Science [1].
Lead author Lena Smirnova, PhD, senior author Thomas Hartung, MD, PhD, and colleagues state they envision “complex, networked interfaces whereby brain organoids are connected with real-world sensors and output devices—and ultimately with each other and with sensory organ organoids [such as retinal organoids]—and are trained using biofeedback, big-data warehousing and machine learning methods.”
The authors emphasize the practicality of the undertaking, asserting that OI-based biocomputing systems will equip medical researchers with the means for faster decision-making, ongoing learning and better efficiencies in energy use and data management.
Further, they write,
[T]he development of ‘intelligence-in-a-dish’ could help elucidate the pathophysiology of devastating developmental and degenerative diseases (such as dementia), potentially aiding the identification of novel therapeutic approaches to address major global unmet needs.”
Smirnova and colleagues also underscore the need for OI researchers, developers and proponents to make sure the new field is continuously checked for ethical soundness.
This aim, they write, “requires an ‘embedded ethics’ approach where interdisciplinary and representative teams of ethicists, researchers and members of the public identify, discuss and analyze ethical issues and feed these back to inform future research and work.”
In coverage of the work by the news division at Johns Hopkins, Smirnova points to advances in medical research likely to spring from the exploration of OI and biocomputing:
We want to compare brain organoids from typically developed donors versus brain organoids from donors with autism. The tools we are developing toward biological computing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in neuronal networks specific for autism—without having to use animals or to access patients—so we can understand the underlying mechanisms of why patients have these cognition issues and impairments.”
Hartung believes healthcare AI and contemporary supercomputing have lately begun to plateau, suggesting the time is ripe to support the rise of biocomputing.
“It will take decades before we [OI researchers] achieve the goal of something comparable to any type of computer,” he says, “but if we don’t start creating funding programs for this, it will be much more difficult.”
Read the full peer-reviewed paper here, a lay summary here and the Hopkins news item here.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.