Biocompatible polymers for scalable production of human neural organoids

The generation of neural organoids from human pluripotent stem cells holds great promise in modeling disease and screenings drugs, but current approaches are difficult to scale due to undesired organoid fusion. Here, we develop a scalable neural organoid platform by screening biocompatible polymers that prevent fusion of organoids cultured in suspension. We show that addition of one inexpensive polysaccharide enables straightforward screening of 298 FDA-approved drugs and teratogens for growth defects using over 2,400 cortical organoids. ### Competing Interest Statement G.N. was an employee of Daiichi-Sankyo Co., Ltd, during the duration of this study, but the company did not have any input on the design of experiments and interpretation of the data. Stanford University holds a patent that covers the generation of cortical organoids (US patent 62/477,858), which has been commercially licensed to STEMCELL Technologies. S.P.P. is listed as an inventor on this patent. All other authors declare no competing interests.