Health care has been on the minds of most Australians recently. However, according to the consulting company Deloitte, it is may be unrecognizable by 2040 thanks to technology.
This is not exactly new news.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has become popular psychology and other medical consultations, and machines that perform operations or patients searching for prescriptions online became normal.
But what about tiny robots made from living frog cells?
According to Dr. Douglas Blackiston, a senior research fellow at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, xenobots could be part of healthcare in the future as they help medical researchers learn more about the human body and diseases.
Currently in their third generation, the Xenobots were created by Dr. Blackiston’s team. These half-millimeter-long autonomous robots are made from living frog cells and replicated using artificial intelligence (AI).
“[Xenobot] is a combination of two words, says Dr. Blackiston. – Xenopus laevis is a species of frog we work with in the lab, which roughly translates to “weird leg” … and “robot” from robot,
A xenobot is basically a “microbiological robot,” he says ABC RN future tense.
“It walks, it swims, it can sense its environment. We program and shape all of these features through the types of experiments we do in the lab.”
Dr. Blackiston says it’s difficult to build a tiny, autonomous robot of this design from synthetic materials, so instead they created it from living cells.
They are also completely biodegradable. ‘[Xenobots] live in water, as they are made of frog cells – wherever amphibians live, you can place them. In addition, at the end of their useful life, there is no trash left.”
How can xenobots be used?
Dr Blackiston says xenobots have many medical applications, but mainly they can help scientists understand how cells function.
This will help them learn more about various human diseases.
For example, the xenobots have helped researchers better understand defects in human lung cells known as “cilia,” hair-like cells that are also present in animal cells, Dr. Blackiston explains.
“[We’ve] learned a lot about how these [cilia cells] organize and how we can make them move and polarize. And it’s actually given us some insight into a number of respiratory diseases that people are dealing with right now.”
Ciliary defects can lead to a range of diseasesincluding primary ciliary dyskinesia, which affects 1 in 20,000 people and can lead to infertility, pneumonia, and Kartagener’s syndrome.
Dr. Blackiston says the application of xenobot technology is still in its infancy.
“We have a number [treatments] that we investigate with [xenobots]from all sorts of things like being able to find the injured spinal cord and release pro-regenerative compounds, to being able to be involved in other parts of regeneration in mammals or in humans in the future,” he says.
“It’s certainly a long way off … but it’s definitely something that’s on our radar and it’s a long-term goal of the research program.”
Are xenobots a life form?
Yes and no. Dr. Blackiston says that despite having living cells, xenobots do not meet the “traditional biological characteristics” of a life form, such as the ability to produce offspring.
However, he defines them as “computer generated life forms”.
“These are the first forms of life that did not arise as a result of natural selection or evolution. They were created using virtual artificial intelligence during simulation and then brought to life in the real world.”
But Dr. Blackiston says that xenobots could potentially evolve to mirror a typical organism, and that much remains to be learned about their potential.
“Many questions, what can be done [xenobots] to be capable. What type of probing could they do? What types of behavior might they have? What kinds of primitive processing might be possible in the system in the future?”
Are there ethical issues?
Dr Blackiston says there are some potential ethical issues with xenobots, namely how they increase the presence of AI in healthcare. He describes this growing interaction as exciting, scary and promising.
“We are just now starting to think about how comfortable we are [in] transferring the choices we make as humans to artificial intelligence.”
“And then from an ethical point of view, you always get into questions of safety and the ethics of creating something that doesn’t exist in nature.
“We as scientists have a very terrible track record of releasing things into the environment with unintended consequences.”
But Dr. Blackiston believes that xenobot technology is “incredibly benign.” He compares it to other self-generating organisms that exist in nature and have been modified by humans, like yeast.
“When you drink alcohol, this yeast [strains] used to produce your alcohol have been selected and bred and are specific strains. If you ate bread and it also had yeast in it, the choices were certainly vast.
“And every crop we have and every domestic animal has been subject to some kind of human modification for thousands of years.”
“Obviously, it can have unintended consequences if the constructs are made in a way that there is genetic manipulation,” Dr. Blackiston acknowledges.
“[But] I can also say that whatever I have built in the lab, the genome is exactly the same as the frog’s.’
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-19/are-xenobots-the-future-of-healthcare/101522250
