Researchers at Harvard University and Tufts University, in the United States, created small biological robots from human tracheal cells.
The robots were called Anthrobots (or anthrorobots). They can move across a surface and stimulate the growth of neurons in a damaged region in a laboratory experiment.
The multicellular robots, whose sizes range from the width of a human hair to the tip of a sharp pencil, were made to self-assemble and have been shown to have a significant healing effect on other cells.
The discovery is a starting point for researchers’ perspective on using patient-derived biorobots as new therapeutic tools for regeneration, healing and treatment of diseases.
The work builds on previous research in laboratories at the Tufts University School of Arts and Sciences and the University of Vermont, in which scientists created multicellular biological robots from embryonic frog cells called xenobots, capable of navigating passages, collecting material, record information, heal from injuries, and even replicate for a few cycles on your own.
At that time, researchers didn’t know whether these capabilities depended on being derived from an amphibian embryo, or whether biorobots could be built from cells from other species.
But in the current study, published in the journal Advanced ScienceProfessor Michael Levin, along with PhD student Gizem Gumuskaya, have discovered that robots can indeed be created from adult human cells without any genetic modification, and are demonstrating some capabilities beyond what has been observed with xenobots.
How to work with human cells?
The discovery begins to answer a broader question posed by the laboratory: what are the rules that govern how cells come together and work together in the body, and whether cells can be taken from their natural context and recombined on different “planes”? body” to perform other functions by design?
In this case, researchers gave human cells, after decades of quiet life in the trachea, an opportunity to reset and find ways to create new structures and tasks.
“We wanted to investigate what cells can do besides creating standard features in the body,” said Gumuskaya, who trained in architecture before going into biology.
“By reprogramming the interactions between cells, new multicellular structures can be created, analogous to the way stone and brick can be organized into different structural elements, such as walls, arches or columns.”
The researchers found that not only could the cells create new multicellular shapes, but they could also move in different ways on a surface of human neurons grown in a laboratory dish and stimulate new growth to fill in the gaps caused by the scratching of the cell layer. .
Exactly how the robots stimulate the growth of neurons is still unclear, but the researchers confirmed that the neurons grew under the area covered by a clustered set of robots, which they called a “superbot.”
“The cellular assemblies we build in the lab can have capabilities that go beyond what they do in the body,” said Levin, who also serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and is an associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute.
“It is fascinating and completely unexpected that normal tracheal cells from patients, without modifying their DNA, can move on their own and stimulate the growth of neurons in a damaged region,” said Levin. “Now we’re looking at how the healing mechanism works and asking what else these constructs can do.”
Advantages of human cells
The advantages of using human cells include the ability to build robots from a patient’s own cells to carry out therapeutic work without the risk of triggering an immune response or requiring immunosuppressants.
They only last a few weeks before breaking down and so can be easily reabsorbed by the body after the job is done.
Furthermore, outside the body, robots can only survive in very specific laboratory conditions and there is no risk of unintentional exposure or spread outside the laboratory. Likewise, they do not reproduce and have no genetic edits, additions or deletions, so there is no risk of them evolving beyond existing safeguards.
How are robots made?
Each robot begins as a single cell, derived from an adult donor. The cells come from the surface of the trachea and are covered in hair-like projections called cilia that wave back and forth.
Cilia help tracheal cells expel small particles that reach the lung’s air passages. We all experience the work of hair cells when we take the final step of expelling particles and excess fluid by coughing or clearing our throat.
Previous studies by other researchers have shown that when cells are grown in the laboratory, they spontaneously form tiny multicellular spheres called organoids.
The researchers developed growth conditions that encouraged the cilia to face outward in the organoids. Within a few days they began to move, propelled by cilia that acted like oars.
They noticed different shapes and types of movement, at first, an important characteristic observed of the biorobotic platform.
Levin reckons that if other features could be added to robots, they could be designed to respond to their environment and travel and perform functions in the body, or help build engineered tissues in the laboratory.
The team, with the help of Simon Garnier of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, characterized the different types of antrorobots produced.
They noted that bots fell into a few distinct categories of shape and movement, ranging in size from 30 to 500 micrometers (from the thickness of a human hair to the tip of a sharpened pencil), filling an important niche between nanotechnology and larger engineering devices.
Some were spherical and completely covered in lashes, and some were irregular or football-shaped, with more irregular lash coverage, or only covered in lashes on one side.
They traveled in straight lines, moved in tight circles, combined these movements, or simply sat and moved. Spheres completely covered in cilia tended to be moved.
Robots with unevenly distributed cilia tended to advance for longer stretches on straight or curved trajectories. They generally survived about 45 to 60 days in laboratory conditions before naturally biodegrading.
“The robots self-assemble on the laboratory plate,” said Gumuskaya. “Unlike xenobots, they don’t need tweezers or scalpels to shape them, and we can use adult cells – even cells from elderly patients – instead of embryonic cells. It’s completely scalable – we can produce swarms of these bots in parallel, which is a good start to developing a therapeutic tool.”
Healing robots
As Levin and Gumuskaya plan to make Antrorobots with therapeutic applications, they created a laboratory test to see how the bots can heal wounds. The model involved growing a two-dimensional layer of human neurons and, by simply scratching the layer with a thin metal rod, they created an open “wound” devoid of cells.
To ensure that the gap was exposed to a dense concentration of robots, they created “superbots”, a cluster that forms naturally when robots are confined to a small space.
The superbots were mostly made up of circles and wigglers, so they didn’t stray too far from the open wound.
Although one might expect that genetic modifications to the robot cells would be needed to help the bots stimulate neural growth, surprisingly the unmodified robots triggered substantial new growth, creating a bridge of neurons as thick as the rest of the healthy cells in the dish.
Neurons did not grow in the wound where the robots were absent. At least in the simplified 2D world of the lab plate, assemblies encouraged efficient healing of living neural tissue.
According to the scientists, further development of the bots could lead to other applications, including eliminating plaque accumulated in the arteries of patients with atherosclerosis, repairing damage to the spinal cord or retinal nerves, recognizing bacteria or cancer cells. or the delivery of drugs to target tissues.
Anthrobots could, in theory, help with tissue healing while establishing pro-regenerative drugs.
Different uses for new technology
Gumuskaya explained that cells have the innate ability to self-assemble into larger structures in certain fundamental ways.
“Cells can form layers, fold, form spheres, classify and separate by type, merge or even move,” Gumuskaya said.
“Two important differences from inanimate bricks are that cells can communicate with each other and create these structures dynamically, and each cell is programmed with many functions, such as movement, secreting molecules, detecting signals, and more. We are just discovering how to combine these elements to create new biological body plans and functions – different from those found in nature.”
Harnessing the inherently flexible rules of cell assembly helps scientists build the bots, but it can also help them understand how the body’s natural plans assemble, how the genome and the environment work together to create tissues, organs, and limbs, and how to restore with regenerative treatments.
See also: Can robots replace priests and priests?
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
