Astonishing Anthrobots

If you want nanobots to circulate in your bloodstream to fight cancer or repair tissues, how might you avoid the immune system? Build multicellular self-assembling biobots out of the patient’s own cells, specifically tracheal cells that have wisps of cilia that can be repurposed to make them motile, like the flagella of a bacterium. That’s what Astonishing Labs, led by Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts, has done.

And then the Anthrobots did something surprising — they traversed living brain tissue to efficiently heal a physical slice through a neural layer.

“The work is amazing, and groundbreaking. The creation of these living devices opens the way to personalized medicine.” — Latest Science

Levin’s blog, has sample Anthrobot videos.

From the full paper:
“Anthrobots self-construct in vitro, via a fully scalable method that requires no external form-giving machinery, manual sculpting, or embryonic tissues and produces swarms of biobots in parallel. They move via cilia-driven propulsion,[ living for 45–60 days.

We found that Anthrobots can traverse neural tissues and defects therein. This popular but highly simplified injury model is just the beginning for understanding how Anthrobots will deal with traversing complex multifaceted 3D tissues. Most remarkably, we found that Anthrobots induce efficient healing of defects in live human neural monolayers in vitro, causing neurites to grow into the gap and join the opposite sides of the injury.

The finding is unexpected given these tissues’ normal roles in the human body – the fact that wild-type cells from trachea will move over and heal neural tissues could not be predicted from any current molecular or tissue-level models.

Anthrobots are derived from adult human tissue, and in the future could be personalized for each patient, enabling safe in-vivo deployment of these robots in the human body without triggering an immune response. Once inoculated in the body via minimally invasive methods such as injection, various applications can be imagined, including but not limited to clearing plaque buildup in the arteries of atherosclerosis patients, bulldozing the excess mucus from the airways of cystic fibrosis patients, and locally delivering drugs of interest in target tissues. The possible applications will represent those arising from exploiting surprising novel behaviors of cells and engineering new ones via future synthetic biology payloads, such as novel enzymes, antibodies, and other ways to manipulate the cells they traverse and interact with. They could also be used as avatars for personalized drug screening, having the advantage of behavior over simple organoids, which could be used to screen for a wider range of active, dynamic phenotypes.

The study of synthetic biological systems is an essential complement to the standard set of phenotypic defaults available in the natural phylogenetic tree of Earth, revealing the adjacent possible in morphological and behavioral spaces. Moreover, these systems offer a safe, highly tractable sandbox in which to learn to predict and control the surprising and multi-faceted system-level properties of multiscale complex systems”

FD: we are one of the first investors in Astonishing Labs.