A new 3D sensor developed at UNC-Chapel Hill and designed to wrap around miniature brain models could give scientists an unprecedented view into human brain activity, accelerating drug discovery and opening new paths for understanding and treating psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Peek inside a laboratory at the UNC Neuroscience Center and you might spot what looks like a collection of tiny white beads spinning in a container of red-tinted liquid. No larger than small peas or pencil erasers, these objects, in fact, aren’t beads at all. They’re brain organoids, three-dimensional balls of living human neurons—like mini brains in a dish. Grown from human cells, they’re one of the only ways scientists have to study living neural activity. But the novelty underway in Chapel Hill isn’t just growing brain organoids themselves. It’s a new sensor technology that is specially designed to work with the organoids and which may hold a key to transforming how scientists record neural activity. If successful, the sensor is poised to become a commercial product that enables speedier brain research, faster drug discovery and more precise treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders.
The promising sensor device is born from a collaboration between two UNC-Chapel Hill professors: Jason Stein, PhD, an assistant professor of genetics at the School of Medicine, and Wubin Bai, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences. The duo’s complementary perspectives—neuroscience and bioelectronics engineering—gained inventive traction as their labs worked together to develop the sensor as part of an AGILE (Advance Great Inventions or Leave Early) grant project sponsored by the Institute for Convergent Science, which is part of Innovate Carolina, the University’s initiative for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development.
Their combined expertise is helping solve a long-term and pronounced problem that researchers run into with brain organoids: recording high-quality brain signals. Current commercial sensors are flat, 2D electrode arrays that only touch the bottom surface of these 3D organoid spheres—missing much of the potential neural activity. This traditional 2D approach requires “molecular glue” to fasten the organoids to the flat plate-shaped sensor. When scientists remove the glued organoids from the flat sensors, it rips off neurons, causing damage that permanently alters the shape of the organoids and renders them unusable for repeated use. That’s a costly loss since brain organoids are time-intensive and expensive to generate. Damaging one organoid wastes about three months of work. It also forces researchers to use additional and expensive reagents, substances added to brain cell cultures that guide cells to become organoid tissue.
The solution: a 3D sensor that Bai and Stein invented to wrap around the organoid like a shell, capturing signals from multiple directions and preserving its structure for repeated use. “We wanted to make a device that allows us to measure activity around the entirety of the organoid without damaging it, and to do this without the molecular glue,” said Stein. “We can put an organoid in the sensor, quickly record activity, and then take it out, put an organoid back in, and increase the efficiency of experiments.”
Not having to use molecular glue to bind the organoids to traditional sensors doesn’t just preserve these mini brain models for reuse. It also saves valuable time. “It takes seven days of preparation to anchor the organoid to the surface of the traditional two-dimensional microelectrode array that’s on the market,” said Bai. “But our sensor uses a physical enclosure and doesn’t require any chemical modification on its surface to bound the organoid, so the process only takes 10 to 20 minutes.”
More precise and efficient drug-to-patient matching, new drug screening
The University has filed a patent application, and the team says the sensor is on the path to become a commercial product with a variety of applications for research labs, biotech startups and pharmaceutical firms. The most direct application is helping academic or commercial labs like Stein’s record electric activity from organoids in a quicker, more affordable way. Another may involve integrating light components into the sensor to support optogenetics research, a technique that uses light to stimulate and control specific neurons for studying neural circuits and behavior in real time.
Stein and Bai also envision embedding microfluidics into the sensor. “One idea would be spritzing existing drugs onto the organoid and using the sensor to see which individuals respond better or worse to a particular drug,” said Stein. “For example, if we could find drugs that decrease the coordinated brain activity in epilepsy patients—and maybe the activity is measured in people with certain genotypes compared to people with other genotypes—we could help prioritize which existing medications are used in particular patients.”
Beyond existing drugs, the sensor could also play a role in helping evaluate new medications, particularly when electrical brain activity is the output measure. “One avenue we see for the sensor is drug screening,” said Bai. “The technology provides several orders of time savings compared to traditional tools, which will be appealing to pharmaceutical companies that value productivity and efficiency.”
Stein emphasized that the sensor does not yet have a diagnostic application, but he envisions diagnostic use as a long-term goal. He explained that future extensions could enable closed-loop systems that stimulate and record neural activity to model synaptic plasticity—essentially allowing neurons to “learn in a dish.” If such organoid models eventually show that neural learning patterns correspond to cognitive ability or behavior in humans, they could one day serve as a powerful new diagnostic tool, though Stein stressed that the field is not there yet.
Stein gets most excited about the sensor’s potential to transform how scientists understand, and ultimately treat, psychiatric disorders. “Psychiatric disorders are incredibly devastating, yet we lack good human model systems to understand what goes wrong or to evaluate new treatments,” he said. “To make progress, we need models of behavior in a dish—neurons interacting, learning, and changing their connections in ways that mirror human behavior. This device is an important step toward creating those models, and once we have them, we’ll be much closer to truly understanding and solving psychiatric disorders.”
Meeting the moment on regulatory shifts
The team’s sensor technology may help academic and commercial researchers meet new and emerging regulatory changes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is increasingly promoting the use of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs)—innovative, human-relevant research tools designed to reduce reliance on animal testing models and improve the predictive power of preclinical testing. NAMs include technologies such as organoids that closely reflect human biology. As regulatory agencies adopt these approaches for drug screening and safety assessment, labs and pharmaceutical companies can turn to high-fidelity tools like the sensor to measure complex neural activity that organoids are designed to reveal.
“Brain organoids are a relatively new and cutting-edge area with potential in research and commercial models,” said Bai. “We’re creating a technology to host these fragile biological systems and reveal their future potential.”
A convergence of neuroscience and bioelectronics engineering
The collaboration between Bai and Stein bridges compelling science from the typically district worlds of neuroscience, bioelectronics and soft materials research. For the sensor project, Stein’s team grows the brain organoids and Bai’s team develops and builds the sensors. Their collaboration hinges on biweekly deep-dive meetings between their respective labs where the Bai’s team learns neuroscience and Stein’s team learns device optimization. Bai described these as “almost like a lecture,” helping the teams find convergent solutions faster than either could alone.
“Our areas of expertise are very complementary, and as they’ve merged, we’ve gained a greater sense of how to refine, digitalize and improve our ideas,” said Bai. “We’ve learned from the biological and neuron science side how to refine and optimize the engineering—whether something is over-engineered or under-engineered, necessary or not.”
The Institute for Convergent Science (ICS) AGILE grant program, which Bai calls “an essential driving force” behind the project, provided seed funding for device development, iteration and experiments. The program also gave access to project management, entrepreneurial mentors, and commercialization experts, plus shared lab space where Stein and Bai’s teams met to grow the organoids and perform recordings with the sensor.
“ICS worked with us as professors who have an idea with commercial potential, walking us through the initial stages of how to make a useful product and giving us seed funding to do that,” said Stein. “It’s been very valuable, especially because we had no prior training on forming a business or making a commercial product.”
Structured around milestone-based funding, the AGILE grants provided by ICS prepare translational research teams to launch startups, secure IP, license technologies, or drive societal impact. ICS and Innovate Carolina further connect teams with investors, industry partners and resources to accelerate translation.
“Watching Jason and Wubin’s teams advance this project has been tremendously exciting. They’ve taken a bold idea and, through inventiveness, dedication, and relentless hard work, turned it into a technology with real commercial traction,” said Greg Copehaver, PhD, Director of the Institute for Convergent Science and Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of Convergent Science. “This project is exactly what the Institute for Convergent Science was designed to support: bringing interdisciplinary teams together to create what could transform brain science and neurodiagnostics. We believe the field of brain research—and the lives of people impacted by that research—will be made better as this team brings its sensor to market.”
Stein and Bai say students have been central to advancing the sensor project, contributing across numerous scientific and translational dimensions of the work. On the engineering side, ICS AGILE postdoctoral researcher Lin Zhang, PhD, helped lead early development, with doctoral students such as Wanrong Xie and others refining fabrication processes, improving device functionality, and exploring new capabilities like optogenetics and microfluidics. Neuroscience center research collaborator Meghana Yeturi made substantial contributions and, together with Xie, successfully completed the National Science Foundation Mid-Atlantic Hub I-Corps customer discovery program hosted by UNC-Chapel Hill’s KickStart Venture Services team. Engineering students, including Yihang Wang and new trainees who are drawn to organoid–device interfaces, have supported iterative design, testing and commercialization-oriented refinements. In Stein’s lab, graduate students Miguel Cuevas and Maya Yin have driven the biological and analytical components, from differentiating and maturing brain organoids to analyzing electrophysiological data—all bolstered by ICS AGILE funding and support. Beyond the lab bench, MBA student Sushma Krishnan contributed market analysis, investor-facing slide development, and early budgeting work as part of an ICS internship pilot program with Kenan-Flagler Business School designed to connect MBA talent with faculty-led innovations.
‘A lot of opportunities to connect with entrepreneurial professionals’
Bai and Stein tapped into a network of funding awards, connections and entrepreneurial support programs to help move the sensor technology forward. Funding to date (beyond the ICS AGILE grant) includes an Innovation Impact Grant from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, NeuroSpark pilot grant from the UNC School of Medicine, and a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award.
Beyond funding, Bai and Stein said ICS is a springboard for building connections to other resources. “ICS provides a lot of opportunities to connect with entrepreneur professionals who help us think about how to develop the products for commercialization or a startup,” said Bai, who noted working with Innovate Carolina’s KickStart Venture Services team, Market Research and Competitive Intelligence Service and the Office of Technology Commercialization. “For commercial translation, we are making the device as practical as possible to target the initial needs of customers, and working with the teams at Innovate Carolina gives us a clearer sense of how to prioritize elements of the device designs, which is quite useful.”
Stein recommends participating in workshops co-founded by KickStart Venture Services. “One of the most useful things was the three-day Triangle Universities Startup Workshop offered by UNC, Duke and NC State,” he said. “The workshop is something every professor should attend because we’re often stuck in the science. If you have an idea with commercial potential, the sessions help you understand new aspects of your work and how you can create a startup to get your idea out there.”
As the team works with Carolina’s technology commercialization team on the intellectual property (IP) process, it is evaluating various paths for moving the technology to market. Thes may include forming a startup company, licensing IP to the company and directly selling the sensor technology. Opportunities for expansion could include offering contracted research services that conduct organoid recordings and differentiation for labs or companies that don’t perform these themselves.
“It’s rewarding to work with Jason and Wubin as they’ve advanced this concept into a commercially compelling innovation,” said Chance Rainwater, PhD, senior commercialization manager at UNC-Chapel Hill. “This sensor technology addresses a critical need in neuroscience research, and the team’s creativity and momentum make the commercial pathway especially promising. I’m excited about the patent UNC is advancing and optimistic this platform can become a powerful tool to improve how researchers and clinicians understand and treat psychiatric disorders.”
This article originally appeared on Innovate Carolina HERE.