Organoid intelligence for developmental neurotoxicity testing

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders has highlighted the need for improved testing methods to determine developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) hazard for thousands of chemicals. This paper proposes the integration of organoid intelligence (OI); leveraging brain organoids to study neuroplasticity in vitro, into the DNT testing paradigm. OI brings a new approach to measure the impacts of xenobiotics on plasticity mechanisms – a critical biological process that is not adequately covered in current DNT in vitro assays. Finally, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques will further facilitate the analysis of complex brain organoid data to study these plasticity mechanisms.