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Beneficiaries

OSQAM: Online Service for quality monitoring of 3D-brain-on-chip and Alzheimer’s Disease Model

Challenge

Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases. Research and development (R&D) of AD drugs is highly desirable. Recent advances in stem cell technology allow us to generate sophisticated 3D structures (organoids) that recapitulate the structure of human organs such as the brain. Currently, the visual inspections necessary to engineer organoids are performed manually, which is tedious, heavily relies on trained staff and is thus expensive.

Solution

The solution for this problem is to support and automate this visual inspection task by developing a digital, worldwide available service to monitor the quality of human organoids at different stages of the engineering process on a novel 3D-brain-on-chip device. The 3D-brain-on-chip serves as an in vitro modeling tool for efficient drug R&D. It is applicable when targeting a particular pharmaceutical agent, and for confirming compounds in upscaled candidate screenings.

Achievements

During the project, sixteen 3D-brain-on-chip devices, each having six chambers, were produced. On these devices, organoids were cultivated in the chambers. At different stages/times of this cultivation process, several thousand microscopic images were taken. These images were used to develop and evaluate a fully-automated image analysis algorithm based on artificial intelligence. This algorithm is provided via the online platform IKOSA (www.ikosa.ai) in order to offer a worldwide available service for quality monitoring for the organoids.

Impacts

The project partners target the pharma R&D market, who can speed up drug R&D for neurodegenerative diseases. Within this project, NORGANOID significantly improved the quality of their chip design while KML Vision developed new image analysis modules for their online platform IKOSA. The combination of these achievements facilitates the usage of standardized samples in drug research, e.g. for the development of treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease, and makes this procedure much more efficient.

Partners

KML Vision GmbH

www.kmlvision.com

Austria

NORGANOID

www.norganoid.at

Austria

  • Type of voucher
    Customised Solution Innovation Voucher
  • Start Date
    30 September 2020
  • End Date
    31 March 2021
  • Duration
    26 weeks
  • Contact Person
    Dr. Philipp Kainz
  • Social Media Hashtags
    #biotech #brainonchip #artificialintelligence

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