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World-First Biocomputing Platform Hits the Market
Wednesday June 4, 2025. 05:30 AM , from Slashdot
![]() The first 115 units will begin shipping this summer at $35,000 each, or $20,000 when purchased in 30-unit server racks. Cortical Labs also offers a cloud-based 'wetware-as-a-service' at $300 weekly per unit, unlocking remote access to its in-house cell cultures. Each CL1 contains 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, reprogrammed from the skin or blood samples of real adult donors. The cells remain viable for up to six months, fed by a life-support system that supplies nutrients, controls temperature, filters waste, and maintains fluid balance. Meanwhile, the neurons are firing and interpreting signals, adapting from each interaction. The CL1's compact energy and hardware footprint could make it attractive for extended experiments. A rack of CL1 units consumes 850-1,000 watts, notably lower than the tens of kilowatts required by a data center setup running AI workloads. 'Brain cells generate small electrical pulses to communicate to a broader network,' says Cortical Labs Chief Scientific Officer Brett Kagan. 'We can do something similar by inputting small electrical pulses representing bits of information, and then reading their responses. The CL1 does this in real time using simple code abstracted through multiple interacting layers of firmware and hardware. Sub-millisecond loops read information, act on it, and write new information into the cell culture.' The company sees CL1 as foundational for testing neuropsychiatric treatments, leveraging living cells to explore genetic and functional differences. 'It allows people to study the effects of stimulation, drugs and synthetic lesions on how neuronal circuits learn and respond in a closed-loop setup, when the neuronal network is in reciprocal exchange with some simulated world,' says theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. 'In short, experimentalists now have at hand a little 'brain in a vat,' something philosophers have been dreaming about for decades.' Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/2155239/world-first-biocomputing-platform-hits-the-marke...
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