The First Meeting of NEU-ChiP has been hosted by The Institute of Neuroscience of the University of Barcelona

This European consortium aims to develop microchips made of neuronal circuits using human induced pluripotent stem cells.

The past 6-7 of June in the Faculty of Medicine of UB, the 6 partners that form this European Consortium presented their progress and discussed the future plans regarding this interesting project. “The meeting was very satisfactory and productive, actually, it was the first time that all the partners could meet in person to discuss and evaluate the NEU-ChiP project”, says Daniel Tornero, researcher of UBneuro, “We are extremely excited with the development of the project and foresee important achievements for the next years”.

The main topic of the meeting was to review the work and the progress made so far by the partners. They presented the first set of results obtained from human neuronal cultures, including the evaluation of the network maturation process from a functional perspective using two different methods: recordings of the levels of calcium inside the neurons, and electrical recordings using multielectrode arrays. Also, they had set up the next steps to continue fulfilling the deliverables and milestones established for the following months

About NEU-ChiP

This Consortium is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and innovation program (FET-Open). The idea of developing these microchips is that the neurons will connect following specific designs, being able to carry out tasks of artificial intelligence and deep learning -currently implemented by electronic circuits- with a very low energetic cost and using neuronal computation that so well works in the human brain.

Among the partners, it counts 6 groups from different countries of Europe: the Aston University (UK), the Loughborough University (UK), the French National Centre for Scientific Research (France), the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (Israel), the 3Brain AG (Switzerland) and the University of Barcelona (Spain).