(CN) — In a study published in Advanced Science Thursday, scientists reveal a novel therapeutic tool: multicellular robots dubbed “Anthrobots” that are capable of regenerating damaged neurons in a lab.
The research was led by Michael Levin, a Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology at Tufts University in Boston. He and PhD student Gizem Gumuskaya set out to create multicellular robots, called Anthrobots, that could one day allow patients to heal themselves.
Anthrobots are not literal robots. Instead, these tiny biobots the scientists describe consist of cells from the human trachea that self-assemble into clusters ranging from the width of a human hair follicle to the tip of a sharpened pencil.
They're capable of movement due to their origin. Normally found on the surface of the trachea, the cells are covered with hairlike projections called cilia that would otherwise sweep particles and fluid from air passages of the lung. For Anthrobots, the researchers found a way to encourage cilia to face outward on clusters, allowing the cilia to propel the biobot around like the oars of a boat.
Previously, Levin collaborated with robotics professor Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont to create Xenobots, earlier multicellular robots, from frog embryo cells capable of movement, collecting materials, recording information and even self-healing and self-replication. For this study, however, Levin and Gumuskaya discovered that they could push these capabilities further by using human cells instead.
“We wanted to probe what cells can do besides create default features in the body,” Gumuskaya said in a statement. “By reprogramming interactions between cells, new multicellular structures can be created, analogous to the way stone and brick can be arranged into different structural elements like walls, archways or columns.”
By probing the capabilities of human tracheal cells, the researchers discovered that they not only form new cluster shapes — departing from previous studies observing only spherical clusters — but that the clusters could travel across human neurons in a lab dish to heal scratched cell layers.
After exposing an open wound of a neuron to a condensed cluster of Anthrobots called “superbots,” the mass of tracheal cells wiggled its way into the wound to create a bridge of neurons that were as thick and healthy as the rest of the cells on the plate.
“The cellular assemblies we construct in the lab can have capabilities that go beyond what they do in the body,” Levin said in a statement. “It is fascinating and completely unexpected that normal patient tracheal cells, without modifying their DNA, can move on their own and encourage neuron growth across a region of damage.”
The next step, Levin added, is to investigate how the Anthrobots’ healing mechanism works and explore its other possible capabilities, particularly since the benefits of biobots are promising for medical treatments. For instance, patients could theoretically use their own healing cells without triggering an immune response or relying on immunosuppressants. Anthrobots also naturally degrade and reabsorb into the body after completing tasks while lacking any genetic modification or the ability to spread or reproduce.
With enough development, the researchers believe Anthrobots may eventually acquire other applications, such as clearing plaque buildup for atherosclerosis patients, repairing damaged spinal cords or retinal nerves, detecting bacteria and cancer cells or even delivering drugs to specific body tissues.
“Anthrobots self-assemble in the lab dish,” said Gumuskaya. “Unlike Xenobots, they don’t require tweezers or scalpels to give them shape, and we can use adult cells — even cells from elderly patients — instead of embryonic cells. It’s fully scalable — we can produce swarms of these bots in parallel, which is a good start for developing a therapeutic tool.”
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