The Smartphone of the Future Is You

“Cyborg” is a fluid term. It just means a biological something that’s boosted by artificial enhancements of some kind, electronic or mechanical or robotic. So, the kid with the

3D printed exoskeleton

is a cyborg; intense body mod dude

Stelarc

is a cyborg;

these

rats are cyborgs; my friend Spencer with an insulin pump is a cyborg. And, now, at one end of the cyborg spectrum find cyborg tissue, biological cells grown together with electronic material such that the two become almost indistinguishable, one aspect controlling and feeding back to the other: “Ultimately, this is about merging tissue with electronics in a way that it becomes difficult to determine where the tissue ends and the electronics begin,” said Harvard’s Charles M.Lieber, the lead author of a

new paper

in

Nature Materials

describing the research.

The work, in the near term, is less about creating future Cylon technology than it is about being able to work better with biological systems, mimicking the various feedback systems that the body uses to regulate itself naturally, but in lab-grown tissue. “We can use electrodes to measure activity in cells or tissue, but that damages them,” explained Lieber. “With this technology, for the first time, we can work at the same scale as the unit of biological system without interrupting it.”

Earlier this week I had the chance to ask Professor Lieber a few questions about his work, clear some things up about, say, whether or not cyborg tissue would allow humans to finally “catch” computer viruses, how cyborg tissue can treat cancer before you even know you have it, and just how sci-fi it all gets. The short answer is very.

How do you envision this tissue existing in a living human, if at all?

Reasonable implanted applications would be as partial replacement of tissue, for example, in damaged organs. Obvious places where there could be substantial benefit include (a) replacement of damaged heart tissue, where cyborg tissue would enable seamless monitoring and feedback/correction of heart after replacement, (b) damaged neural tissue (e.g., as a result neurodegenerative disease, traumatic brain injury, or simply aging) where the electronics could correct for issues, as well as partial replacement of blood vessels, again used as a means to continuously monitor health state. What’s the next step in the research toward active deployment of the technology?

In the short term will be the development of this advance as a new platform for real-time in-vitro drug screening/testing from 3D tissue models (vs. traditional 2D cultured cells). This is now an important goal in the pharmaceutical industry as it is now well-known that isolated cells or 2D arrays can behave very differently than cells in 3D tissue. Hence, new technology that allows access to screening throughout 3D tissue could greatly speed-up evaluations prior to animal or clinical trials.

What are the limits of this? In the future would it be possible to have basically an entire organism made up of cyborg tissue subject to outside electrical control/monitoring? How sci-fi can we get?

It is probably unreasonable to think about an entire organism developing with cyborg tissue as of now because organisms grow from single cells that differentiate and proliferate, where as our nanoelectronic tissue scaffold is fixed in size as made (i.e., it is not self-replicating/growing). What can be exploited is the expandability of the highly flexible and open nanoelectronic scaffold; that is, it might be initially, compressed at outset of cell-seeding, and thus allowed to expand into the growing tissue/organ.

I think the real benefit and realistic but very much sci-fi capability is to have powerful electronic circuitry seamlessly merged with biological cells/tissue — what we are doing is blurring the difference between electronics and cells and how they interact — you could think about having a nanoprocessor communicating back and forth with your brain, and perhaps even directly with the internet … Is tissue like this if it were say embedded in some part of a human subject differently to disease/pathogens? Is this a way a human could finally get a computer virus?

I do not think this is something to worry about at this stage, but if one ultimately embedded electronic processor within the tissue having external access, the processor might be subject to virus.

If we come back to ground, any implantable devices in foreseeable future would not have this problem but ultimately would allow — without going to doctor/hospital — the capability to identify disease (whether it is virus, cancer, etc.) and as we build in more functionality besides nanosensors, allow feedback to treat this disease ideally without person every knowing there was a problem.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

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