The Biological Microbot that will Save Lives in the Near Future

Will you be taking xenobots instead of medicine any time soon?

A recent development in systems biology combines biology and computer science in a way never seen before, by letting AI methods model a miniscule robot made out of frog tissue.

This may all sound a little bizarre, so let’s clear it up. Sam Kriegman and his team in Vermont followed the trend of solving complex problems by feeding them to AI. While AI has become jargon everyone is familiar with, not everybody knows how it works.

What this research group essentially did was to let the AI automatically design various potential lifeforms, with a specific function in mind. When they had the blueprint, the next step was to try to recreate the lifeform in a lab.

The cells they used to make the robot are embryonic stem cells harvested from an animal named Xenopus Laevis, hence the name xenobots. This Xenopus is a widely used model organism so there is a lot of information out there already about the location of specific stem cells in the embryo which made this process possible.

The robot itself is made out of two types of cells, cardiac and epithelial cells. The first are contractile in nature, enabling the robot to move. The latter are cells used to cover the surface of the robot.

But what purpose can these robots serve? First and foremost, they may serve as an advanced way to deliver drugs to specific parts inside the human body. Secondly, for the purpose of pure science, this may help our understanding of how and why bodily forms and functions may come to fruition. And lastly, since these robots are made out of organic tissue, by which they break down after a couple of days, they can be used to help us clean the environment.

As you might have noticed, I have been reluctant to call this robot an organism, even though it is made out of organic tissue. It is not clear if we should classify these devices as such. In this huge grey area, questions lurk such as at which point these robots are subject to ethical standards or what if we made these robots out of human cells.

These robots might prove very useful for all kinds of applications. But first we should have a conversation about the moral implications of using self-created organisms for our own benefit.

Sources:

Kriegman, S., et al. (2020). "A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117(4): 1853-1859.

Ball, P. (2020). "Living robots." Nature Materials 19(3): 265-265.