Creation is
an amalgam of silicone polymer and heart muscle cells
(July 22, 2012) Using recent advances in marine biomechanics, materials
science, and tissue engineering, a team of researchers at Harvard University
and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have turned inanimate
silicone and living cardiac muscle cells into a freely swimming “jellyfish.”
The finding serves as a proof of
concept for reverse engineering a variety of muscular organs and simple life
forms. It also suggests a broader definition of what counts as synthetic life
in an emerging field that has primarily focused on replicating life’s building
blocks.
The researchers’ method for
building the tissue-engineered jellyfish, dubbed “Medusoid,” was published in a
Nature Biotechnology paper on July 22.
An expert in cell- and
tissue-powered actuators, coauthor Kevin Kit Parker has previously demonstrated
bioengineered constructs that can grip, pump, and even walk. The inspiration to
raise the bar and mimic a jellyfish came out of his own frustration with the
state of the cardiac field.
Similar to the way a human heart
moves blood throughout the body, jellyfish propel themselves through the water
by pumping. In figuring out how to take apart and then rebuild the primary
motor function of a jellyfish, the aim was to gain new insights into how such
pumps really worked.
“It occurred to me in 2007 that
we might have failed to understand the fundamental laws of muscular pumps,”
says Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at the
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty
Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
“I started looking at marine organisms that pump to survive. Then I saw a jellyfish
at the New England Aquarium and I immediately noted both similarities and
differences between how the jellyfish and the human heart pump.”