Brain Organoids: from Space to AI with Alysson Muotri

Welcome back to Business Trip by PsyMed Ventures, a podcast exploring the future of mental health & wellness! 🍄

Matias & Greg interviews Professor Alysson R. Muotri on the latest episode of Business Trip. Alysson is a geneticist and developmental biologist at UC San Diego who runs one of the most boundary-pushing brain organoid labs in the world. His team sends mini-brains to the International Space Station to accelerate their aging, research that’s already led to an FDA-approved clinical trial for a drug developed in space. He’s also a co-founder building biological learning systems that could complement, or even rethink, current approaches to AI.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why brain organoids age faster in space, and what that unlocks for studying neurological disease

• Repurposing HIV antiretroviral drugs to treat neurological conditions

• The case for brain organoids as inspiration for a new generation of AI models

• When (and if) mini-brains become conscious: the experiments designed to answer the unanswerable

Listen to the episode here, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.

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