At first glance you probably think you’re looking at some sort of bacteria or another microscopic creature swimming around a petri dish. However, these are actually robots, ones made completely of biological cells.
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00:00 At first glance, you probably think you're looking at some sort of bacteria or another
00:07 microscopic creature swimming around a petri dish.
00:09 But what if I told you these are actually robots, ones made completely of biological
00:14 cells?
00:15 They're called arthropods, and they could someday be used to repair nerve damage, deliver
00:19 targeted pharmaceuticals and beyond.
00:21 Here's one of the study's researchers, Gizem Gumuskaya, to explain.
00:25 Arthropods are the first fully cellular, living biological robots made up of human cells.
00:32 Similar to how a tiny planted seed autonomously develops and grows up to be a plant, each
00:37 one of these biological robots, an arthropod, also develops from a seed, a single human
00:43 cell planted into an extracellular matrix, into this multicellular motile machine.
00:50 But unlike a regular robot made of wires and gears and the like, these have no mechanical
00:54 parts, just cells, which means they are compatible with other biological cells, ones which might
00:59 be in your body, meaning they could be used to repair damaged tissue from the inside.
01:03 In our paper, we showed that arthropods can move through a sheet of damaged human nerve
01:09 cells and repair the nerves in the course of three days.
01:14 And they're made from the host cells of the person whose tissue they're repairing, meaning
01:17 there's no concern about the arthropods being rejected by the body.
01:21 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:25 (upbeat music)