In a development that could challenges the boundaries of technology and biology, an Australian startup has unveiled the world's first commercial biological computer, running on living human cells.

The CL1, developed by Melbourne-based Cortical Labs, fuses human stem cell-derived neurons with silicon, creating a new class of AI known as "Synthetic Biological Intelligence" (SBI), capable of learning and adapting faster than standard silicon-based AI, the company says, while consuming significantly less energy.

"Unlike using artificial neural networks, we grow our real biological neurons into networks, onto computer chips," founder and CEO of Cortical Labs, Dr Hon Weng Chong, told Reuters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

"We take blood or skin and we can transform them into stem cells and from stem cells into brain cells or neurons that we then use them for compute and intelligence," Hon said.

The neurons grow on a silicon chip with tiny electrical contacts connecting them to the digital hardware.

The company says the CL1 could revolutionise life science research, drug discovery and testing, and early disease detection and accelerate the development of personalised medicine.

"With this kind of technology, we potentially could grow neurons taken from patients with say a dementia or with epilepsy and test compounds and drugs that would then be personalized and tailored to that patient," Hon said.

The unit has an artificial life support system to keep the cells healthy, including pumps instead of a heart, a feeding reservoir, filters instead of kidneys and oxygen and CO2 gas and waste management system.

The CL1 units, which will be manufactured to order and ready to ship later this year, are destined for laboratories and research facilities capable of cultivating their own cells.

Cortical Labs also plan to offer Wetware-as-a-Service (WaaS), allowing customers to engage with the cultivated cells remotely via the cloud to develop applications.

In an earlier experiment, detailed in a 2022 issue of the journal Neuron, Cortical Labs demonstrated the capacity of this technology with a collection of about 800,000 neurons, cultured in the lab, successfully learning to play the computer game Pong.

(Production: Stuart McDill/Miguel Gutierrez/Michele Spatari)