Cyborg flesh is now a reality

Bioengineers from Harvard have taken the first step towards making the Terminator series come true—they’ve created functioning samples of cyborg tissue, half-living and half-electronics. Tissue samples include neurons, muscle and heart cells, and blood vessels interwoven with nanowires and transistors.

 

The electronic component of the tissue acts as a sensor network, gathering data from the living tissue and sending the information directly to a computer. For example, the electronics in a cyborg heart tissue sample could record the heart rate of the sample and then send the data to a computer.

 

To start building the cyborg flesh, researchers started with a 3D scaffold—usually made of collagen—where cells were encouraged to grow. Nanowires and transistors were woven into the collagen matrix to create “nanoelectric scaffolds (nanoES),” and the cells were then grown as usual.

 

The Harvard team has mostly grown rat tissues so far, but they’ve also grown a 1.5 cm cyborg human blood vessel. According to lead researcher, Charles Lieber, the next step is to use the nanoelectric scaffold to talk to individual cells, to “wire up tissue and communicate with it in the same way a biological system does.” So far, they’ve only used the nanoES to read cellular data.

 

These cyborg tissues could be used to create organs-on-a-chip which can then be used to test the effects of drugs and other substances. This means that no humans or animals would be hurt in the course of these experiments.

Organs-on-a-Chip from Wyss Institute on Vimeo.


 

— TJD, GMA News