Silicon Valley’s Molecular Devices Brings AI to Brain Organoid Culture
Molecular Devices has released an upgrade to its CellXpress.ai Automated Cell Culture System, adding rocking incubation and AI-driven workflow automation for brain organoid culture. The feature is designed to reduce the high manual workload of organoid maintenance and to support long-term, reproducible experiments for neurodegenerative disease research.
Brain organoids—miniature 3D brain-like structures derived from stem cells—are widely used for modeling complex neurological conditions but typically require more than 100 days of daily feeding and monitoring. Their growth is sensitive to nutrient distribution, and manual maintenance of just 10 plates can consume about 27 hours per week.
With the new upgrade, rocking incubation maintains nutrient flow within the wells, while AI-guided scheduling automates feeding, media changes, and imaging. It captures full-well images for time-resolved tracking, maintains 37 °C with stable nutrients, minimizes contamination via closed automation, and runs workflows across weekends and extended timelines without operator input, reportedly cutting manual work to a few hours a week.
The CellXpress.ai platform functions as an AI-driven “cell culture hub” designed to automate the entire process—from stem cell maintenance through organoid generation and downstream assays. Its machine learning–based decision engine standardizes feeding and passaging events, using imaging data to distinguish between wells progressing as expected and those showing anomalies. Researchers receive automated alerts for outlier detection or error conditions, allowing plates or wells to be removed early in the workflow to save reagents and avoid downstream variability.
Image credit: Molecular Devices’ CellXpressAI
The system operates continuously on a 24/7 schedule and records all events, including digital microscopy data, in a unified software environment. This provides reproducibility across assays, supports multiple stem cell lines, spheroids, or organoids in parallel, and maintains standardized protocols that reduce human error. Users can run workflows through a graphical protocol builder rather than custom scripting, and the platform integrates with external devices for more complex operations such as centrifugation, confocal imaging, or supernatant analysis.
By combining AI-driven scheduling with rocking incubation for consistent nutrient distribution, the system is designed to maintain organoids over extended culture periods while reducing variability. Molecular Devices positions this as a way to improve reproducibility in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease models, while accelerating throughput in labs where manual cell culture is a bottleneck.
The upgrade follows the company’s earlier launch of the QPix FLEX Microbial Colony Picking System, designed to automate microbial colony screening. Together, these platforms reflect Molecular Devices’ broader push to reduce manual workloads in both mammalian and microbial research.
Molecular Devices, headquartered in Silicon Valley and part of Danaher Corporation, develops bioanalytical measurement systems, software, and consumables for life science research and therapeutic development. Its portfolio includes platforms for high-throughput screening, genomic and cellular analysis, colony selection, and microplate detection, supporting productivity and reproducibility across laboratories worldwide.
Topic: Next-Gen Tools
