Progress beyond the state of the art
To our knowledge, no one has demonstrated the ability to generate human neural organoids in an automated system. Neurons are post-mitotic, and thus human neural tissue is not generally available for large scale screening applications such as in drug development or toxicity testing. These essential research steps have so far been carried out with animal models. There is a large biological gap between animal models and the human physiology, especially in issues pertaining to the nervous system. A fully scalable, automated approach for generating human brain-tissue-surrogates could bridge the gap between in vitro and in vivo work by providing a complex human cell-based test system that recapitulates key developmental and health aspects of the human brain in a dish. So far, organoid production requires extensive manual labor, thus limiting the scope of organoid-based experiments. With our automated approach, we open the door to use artificial human brain tissue in large scale high throughput screening campaigns as they are used in the pharmaceutical industry or in chemical toxicity testing.
Socio-economic impact and societal implications
Long term, the potential socio-economic impact is very large. If we succeed in rekindling or augmenting the body’s own tissue-resident repair function, we will fundamentally change the way we approach medical treatment of aging or chronic degenerative decline. By addressing this question in a variety of key tissues, we potentially counter age-related ailments in the nervous system, the reproductive system, and the blood stream. In the long run, maintaining inherent tissue repair function could lead to longer life spans with a much higher quality of life especially in the older population. The societal impact for quality of life for patients, for the cost of care, and for the life of relatives and care givers should not be underestimated.
Mid-term, our pioneer protocols for automating organoid production can turn the next page in drug- and toxicity testing. Over time, it becomes more evident that animal models are differing in key biological aspects and thus cannot fully emulate human biology even under the best conditions. Harnessing the power of cellular self-organization, organoid technologies and human 3D-cell culture are bound to become the next generation technology for drug screening and tox evaluation by emulating the rich interplay of various cell types in the complex arrangements of tissues. Tremendous progress has been made in this field in the last few years, and we are at the forefront of enabling large scale screening campaigns for diseases that are uniquely human and could not be addressed with animal models so far. Incidentally, establishing drug and tox-screening in human organoid systems could also significantly reduce the number of animals necessary in early stage clinical testing as toxic compounds can be excluded early in drug and safety testing pipelines.
