"This is the first time, as far as I know, that anybody has done anything like this - generate a structure that has the properties of life from something, which is completely homogeneous at the chemical level and devoid of any similarity to natural life."
Increasingly, organoids are being fused to create 'assembloids', complexes of interacting organoids. Sergiu Pasca's laboratory at Stanford University has created an assembloid that models the human spinothalamic pathway, a neural circuit critical for the transmission of sensory information from the body to the brain.
"This offers a powerful tool to selectively affect dynamic properties at each individual condensate," says Rick Young, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In late 2022, researchers at Monash University in Australia reported in Neuron that they had grown not just rodent brain cells but also human ones, communicated with the neurons via electrical signals from a silicon microchip, and let the cells play Pong.