Automated human organoid platform
Human midbrain organoids, made reproducible.
What varies between your experimental outcomes should be your compound. Not the process.
Human midbrain organoid · whole-mount immunofluorescence
01Consistency
Human biology is hard to model. Modelling it the same way twice is harder.
Around 95% of CNS drug candidates fail in clinical development. Much of that traces back to where the evidence comes from: animal models and two-dimensional culture do not adequately capture human physiology, and their predictive value is particularly poor for the central nervous system. Organoids close part of that gap, but only if they are consistent enough to trust, and conventionally, built by hand in animal-derived matrix, they have not been.
So we engineered the process, not just the organoid. PEARL’s automated midbrain organoids (AMOs) are seeded, patterned, fixed, stained and analysed in the same plate they are grown in, with no human hands in between.
Key features of our technology
Matrix-free
Organoids form from a single-cell suspension without Matrigel or other animal-derived matrix, removing a known source of lot-to-lot variability.
Automated end to end
From seeding on day 0 through fixation and staining, the workflow is executed by liquid handling rather than by hand.
Plate-native
Generated and kept in standard SBS 96 V-bottom plates on standard liquid handlers, so they fit inside existing screening infrastructure, not around it.
Quantitative by design
In-plate clearing and imaging produce whole-organoid readouts that can be measured, not only described.
Independent of cell line
Consistency is a property of the process itself, not of any single cell line. It holds regardless of which human iPSC line the organoids are grown from.
The same result, batch after batch.
Viability read for every organoid individually across three independent production batches, plotted rather than averaged. Two PEARL lines cluster tightly; conventional organoids scatter far wider.
Measured, not claimed
<3.6%
Intra-batch CV
Coefficient of variation in viability within a batch, against more than 50% reported for conventional organoids.
20,000
Organoids/day, capacity
What one platform can handle, against roughly 200 per day for one person working by hand.
0.92
Z′-factor
Assay quality on the standard high-throughput screening measure. Anything above 0.5 is considered an excellent assay.
35 days
To a screenable organoid
Against 60 to 90 days for standard protocols.
02Technology
From stem cells to analysable data, on one plate.
The organoid never leaves its well between seeding and readout, and no step waits for a pair of hands. That is what makes the numbers above repeatable, not a one-off.
The full production workflow, how the tissue is characterised and how it compares with conventional methods all live on the Technology page.
03Applications
A piece of working neural tissue, not a single disease model.
What we grow is intact human neural tissue (neurons through glia, in their own cellular context) with midbrain-specific cell types. That makes it useful for far more than one indication.
The tissue wires itself together. Neurons extend processes across the organoid, form bundles between clusters, and the spontaneous activity that follows stays synchronised between distant positions: evidence that the tissue is connected, not just alive.
That is the difference between mere aggregates of cells and a piece of tissue, and it is what makes a compound’s effect on the network measurable at all.
Toxicity screening
A compound that damages human midbrain tissue has told you something decisive, early. And with several cell types present, selective loss is distinguishable from general cytotoxicity.
Functional studies
Which pathways a compound intervenes in, whether something accumulates, what changes in the tissue follow: structure, markers and network activity, all read from the same organoid.
Your own cell line
Any human iPSC line can be taken into the process. Bring the donor background or mutation your programme is built on, and get reproducible organoids from it.
04Working with PEARL
You bring the question. We run the experiment and hand back the data.
PEARL operates as a contract research organisation. We run the experimental work on our own platform and deliver results you can act on, at whatever depth the question requires.
You bring the research question
Tell us what you are trying to measure, whatever stage that question is at. That is the only starting point we need.
Together we plan the experiment
Design, readouts and depth of analysis are settled together, before anything is seeded, so you know exactly what you will get back.
We deliver the results
We run the experiment on our own platform, from organoid production to actionable analysis, and hand back quantitative results, images and the raw material behind them.
Depth is a dial, not a package. A viability readout and a full single-cell characterisation are the same platform, run further. We will tell you which one your question actually needs, including when the answer is the cheaper one.
Scientific record
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers and preprints underpinning the platform.
- 2025
- 2025
- 2021
- 2021
Ready to run a study?
Tell us what you are trying to measure. We will tell you honestly whether our organoids are the right model for it.