ABSTRACT:
When we think about Digital Medicine, we often think about the possibility of rendering medical and healthcare services with higher efficiency, faster and perhaps remotely. By definition, Digital Medicine describes a field concerned with the use of technologies as tools for measurement, and intervention in the service of human health. And one of the greatest technologies of all time that can entirely change the trajectory of Digital Health and Medicine as we know it is the discovery of the possibility of merging life and machines into one. That is the invention of stem-cells-programmable nanorobots called Xenobots. This spans across the field of Medicine, Digital Health, Molecular Biology, Molecular Physics and Nanotechnology. [1]
According to Sam Kriegman and Douglas Blackiston, the recognized inventors of xenobots in their article “A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms” [2][3], Xenobots are synthetic lifeforms that are designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues. They are named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), a species of African aquatic frog with a powerful combination of experimental tractability and close evolutionary relationship with humans.
The first xenobots were built by Douglas Blackiston according to blueprints generated by an AI program (object to the left), which was developed by Sam Kriegman (object to the right); built from frog skin (green) and heart muscle (red).
“PROGRAMMABLE” LIFE?
Artificial intelligence and frog cells are xenbots’ two secret components. Frog skin cells and frog heart cells are the two distinct types of frog cells used to create the xenobot.
Due of their distinct qualities, heart and skin cells are used:
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The self-contracting nature of cardiac muscle cells, which make up heart cells, is what enables your heart to pump blood automatically.
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Skin cells, on the other hand, are immobile by nature.
They become functional in terms of mobility when heart and skin cells are joined. The “magical” aspect is that if skin cells and heart cells are put together in a precise way, they may each perform a specific role. Sam Kriegman and his team of researchers, who included Michael Levin and Josh Bongard, were able to create xenobots with the functionality they needed by combining skin and heart cells in particular ways, with specific configurations. For instance, the motion you observe in the GIF below (a forward “walking” motion) is caused by the particular arrangement of heart and skin cells.
The red and green blocks represent self-contractioning heart cells, whereas the turquoise blocks are immobile skin cells. The xenobot’s movement was set to occur when everything was put together in the manner described above.
The big yet simple concept is that you create a certain configuration of skin cells and heart cells and assemble them in that exact configuration if you wanted to move the xenobot in a particular way, like leaping up and down. The xenobot will move in the way you wanted it to based on that particular setup. Millions of these configurations were created by researchers using supercomputers and AI algorithms in order to determine which configurations cause a certain movement.
Some of the configurations AI algorithms used to “train” xenobots to move in a particular way include the following:
Fig: One hundred computer-designed blueprints for a walking organism composed of passive (cyan) and contractile voxels (red).
APPLICATIONS OF XENOBOTS
There are a number of possible uses for future xenobots that are suggested by their behaviour and biocompatibility.
1. CANCER AND TUMOR TREATMENTS:
Using xenobots to remove malignancies from the brain, pancreas, intestines, and other areas is one of their promising uses. Once inside the body, conventional nanorobots constructed of metal or plastic are recognized as “foreign objects” and attacked by the body’s immune system. As opposed to conventional nanorobots, xenobots have the benefit of being created from the patient’s own cells. These xenobots won’t be rejected by the patient’s body because they are created from the patient’s cells.
2. REMOVAL OF ARTERIAL PLAQUES:
This will perhaps be one of the most popular uses of xenobots in the nearest future. Arterial plaque occurs when cholesterol builds up in the inner lining of the artery. In simpler terms, plaques are lumps of fat inside the arteries. Xenobots, under specific configurations, can be programmed to attack these fat plaques by endocytosis.
3. TACKLING OF PLASTIC POLLUTION IN THE OCEAN:
Xenobots are biodegradable since they are made entirely of frog cells. It has, hence, been hypothesized that future xenobots may be able to find and aggregate tiny bits of plastic in the ocean into a large ball of plastic that a conventional boat or drone can gather and bring to a recycling center. This is similar to how swarms of xenobots tend to work together to push microscopic pellets in their dish into central piles. In contrast to conventional technologies, xenobots behave utilizing energy from fat and protein naturally stored in their tissue, which lasts for approximately a week, after which they simply decompose into dead skin cells.
4. CURING OF NEURODEGENERATIVE DISEASES:
Because of their self-repairing abilities, Xenobots can be used to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease as well as neurological cancer-related problems. These abilities enable Xenobots to repair normal damaged cells, deliver drugs to their specific target, and reduce cytotoxicity in most malignancy situations. New methods will be used in the future to treat chronic diseases and the issues they cause.
5. TARGETED DRUG DELIVERY:
Targeted drug administration, also known as smart drug delivery, is a technique for administering medication to a patient in such a way that the medication is more concentrated in some areas of the body than others. This method of delivery is mostly based on nanomedicine, which aims to use medication administration via nanoparticles to counter the drawbacks of traditional drug delivery. These drug-loaded nanoparticles would be directed to specific areas of the body that only contain sick tissue, avoiding contact with healthy tissue. A targeted medicine delivery system aims to extend, localize, target, and engage with the sick tissue in a safe manner. [4] In the future, xenobots might be created from a patient’s own cells for therapeutic uses like tailored medicine administration, avoiding the immune reaction issues that other types of micro-robotic delivery systems face. With more cell types and bioengineering, these xenobots may be utilized to scrape plaque from arteries and find and cure disease.
CONCLUSION:
The ethical concerns of the use of Xenobots in Medicine and Healthcare Delivery will definitely be a long topic of debate, but an even greater and more interesting concern will be its impact on Politics.
Whatever it will be, we are only a few steps away from finding out!
REFERENCES:
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Images: All images are sourced from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and all image courtesies are to them.