I was once contacted by FinalSpark where they offered free early remote access to use their biocomputing platform. The platform is accessible remotely and allows experiments on neurospheres made from living cells, sitting in an incubator, in their lab, in Vevey, Switzerland. A neurosphere is a round structure build out of approximately 10’000 neurons, connected to electrodes in different places. The platform uses python scripts to communicate with the neuron allowing for various functionalities, such as: Stimulate living neurons, Read data from neurons, Log all the data in a database, and Display graphically the results of experiments for further analysis.
I was too busy to come up with a clear project idea that could beat alreadty existing stuff such as neurons playing Doom [0] (not related to FinalSpark). Still waiting for someone to show something cool using this platform.
As someone actually in this space, does the "rental" concept give you any concerns about the quality of research this can support? Like, if the previous customer's use of the organoids will have stateful impacts that impact what you observe? It strikes me that with conventional computers in the cloud we have pretty straight-forward assurances that each customer gets the instance in a fresh state.
How hard is it to do something like this on your platform [0]? Are there any other real-world examples where people are using your platform to do something similar?
If you talk about learning to play doom, I would say it is unrealistic at this point and still a topic of research, the purpose of the neuroplatform is precisely to find reliable ways to train neurons to perform a specific task.
Well, we already have systems with 32 electrodes, and we are looking at alternative to increase this by several orders of magnitude. I hope we have something next year.
I'd imagine its easy to set up independent platforms for different users. Organoids are pretty easy to develop. Large costs come from Multi Electrode Array recording devices that can be >30K.
That's a great question I hadn't thought of. Neurons definitely have state in vitro (internally and inter-neuron, e.g. synapses and tunneling nanotubes).
I was too busy to come up with a clear project idea that could beat alreadty existing stuff such as neurons playing Doom [0] (not related to FinalSpark). Still waiting for someone to show something cool using this platform.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw