Gadgetory

most of human history is about making biology better it's breeding new kinds of plants building prosthetics finding ways to go beyond what our bodies can let us do two years ago I tested this for myself I got a magnet implanted in my finger so I can sense metal and motors and later I added an NFC chip so I can read it with my phone they've become part of my body but homebrew implants can only do so much so what's happening on the cutting edge of biohacking where people are changing nature in ways we never thought possible founded by two former Columbia University researchers epi bone isn't trying to add new tech to our bodies it's trying to replace something the pieces of bone that people lose because of cancer accidents or congenital defects and it's come up with a completely new way to do it around the time that interchangeable parts began to be used on the assembly line we started kind of to view the body in a similar way if you needed a new heart you know you might get one out of a person or engineer a new one using technology but the idea was let's replace body parts but now we're really at this stage where a lot of people think of the body as a renewable resource of cells as opposed to just a summation of parts and so lots of groups around the world are dedicated to growing different body parts so how would you describe what you're doing here where it's pretty simple to describe we're growing bones from stem cells we've grown human bone for years we have not put this human bone in a human yet we and we hope to do that next year for the first time what would it look like actually if you have a bone problem how would you get a bone grown so we take two things from the patient the first thing is we just take an image so a CT scan will do that has three-dimensional data that we can map to digital fabrication devices we use 3d printers and 3d micro milling machines to mill a perfect shape bone scaffold and a to machine a corresponding bioreactor we also take a sample of fat tissue from the patient and out of that fat tissue we take the stem cells so we put the stem cells into this bioreactor with the scaffold and after three weeks we have a piece of living bone that we can then use in surgery so right now you take a sort of segment of bone that exists yeah use it as sort of a structure to build the actual bone around is that yeah or inside we're using a D cellular eyes bovine bone so a piece of cow bone we strip it of all cellular material and then reinstalled once we extract the cells can take the CT of the patients and design a graph that would perfectly match the defects that we want to graphs like this oh yes so you remove all those cellular materials that is foreign for the patient's then you live with with just the structures and we reintroduce the patient cells in there that actually seems really conceptually simple oh that's a key thing we we want to make the process as simple as possible so that eventually we can scale up so that's why we have this by reactive system that allow us to just put the materials we need and put the cells in set it up and let it grow so if we're starting from a bone block with no cells on it we can we're limited by the begin the size of the starting material but with 3d printers it's just the size of the printer that's delimiting exactly yeah and if you think about like well there's a lot of people that are working on making 3d printers be able to print all kinds of things so we're what we watch that with excitement right now we can do 3d printing it's it's a nice system that allow us to create the exact structure but the microarchitectures of the scaffolding material is still very different from the micro attic I can take you off the bone the quality of it still hasn't matched the native structures of the bone so what makes this better than the current procedures for transplanting a bone um so right now if you transplant a piece of bone it's from a cadaver so either from a cadaver or from yourself if it's from a cadaver you have to kill the bone before you put it in the body and so it's it's not alive and it doesn't interact with what's there if you cut a piece of bone out of yourself it's alive and it can theoretically connect pretty well with the host tissue but then there are oftentimes mechanical mismatches and the shape isn't perfect and you have to have a second surgery so after time our bone becomes more and more integrated into the body wall the alternatives become you know seen as scar tissue so epi bone is working on real world practical solutions to a problem we've had for ages creative studio New Deal design meanwhile thinks cyborg bodies are coming so how will we use them among other things New Deal has worked on the design of the Fitbit light rose light field camera and Google's project ara phone this is gary and meet the president and founder this is a sketch rendering off the under skin project this is essentially an implant it has two nodes going under the skin and that brings this provocative notion of actually implanting things under the skin and then how do we interact with it what do you think is the kind interaction that people would want to have with these implanted devices like what do you think they want to think of them as it's a very distilled and personal form of UI interaction with the space around you or with other people the other side will be more your personal health and your personal control panel some of the graphic user interfaces is a little bit far-fetched now but it could be could be there if needed how do you convince people that's not actually the scary thing that they've seen in a bunch of movies where you have tracking devices attached to you you already see that there's so many implants and so many technologies that are coming you know replacing organs and so on I think we don't like to discuss it because of the creep factor of it but it's right there you know people are replacing joints replacing eyes it's just around the corner so I'd rather have a design opinion or even a debate over it rather than living it only to doctors and technologists because I do feel that some of the humanistic elements are missing from their discussion topics but that's not to say scientists aren't making any tangible leaps you probably know Autodesk for its architecture software but for the past couple of years it's been working on something called project cyborg a design platform for biology research on a molecular scale and synthetic biologist Andrew Hessel a distinguished researcher at Autodesk thinks that's just the start in fact he even thinks he can use these tools to treat cancer so this is a model of Autodesk's first synthetic virus Phi X 174 it's a virus that kills ecoli bacteria you can think of it as an antibiotic so this is a 3d printed model of that virus and wherever there's a different color it's a different protein but you can see that there's repeating patterns when the virus infects an e coli cell the genetic material goes into the e coli and it starts to produce these proteins which then goes to produce these part of and it kills the e.coli cell and make so many of these particles it splits the the coli open what's really significant as we demonstrate that the digital infrastructure for synthetic biology is now so accessible and so capable that we can start to make these agents really fast and really cheap you know one thing I thought was really interesting that I saw was the sort of open source cancer curing projects that you were working on at one point what was sort of the idea behind that your cancer can now be studied to the molecular level and a custom-designed drug being manufactured in a very short period of time and tested on your own cancer cells in a laboratory and you can score engage the results of that it was just estimated a few weeks ago that it's costing upwards of two billion dollars now to research and develop and bring to market a new drug that's just not sustainable especially when it can take 15 years to make a new dress well how do you hack that system how do you change global pharma and I realized well you can do it if you stop making mass-market drugs because the longest and most expensive part of developing a drug is going through phase clinical trials so if you make a drug for just one person you kind of get around that your cancer is different than anyone elses not only will your experience in being treated be differently but you need a unique drug I was fascinated by something called an uncle it acquires which are viruses really weak viruses that can only infect cancer cells they can't infect normal cells because they're too weak but they can kind of get an in on the cancer cell start to grow kind of giving a cancer cell a cold break the cancer cell open and actually release more viruses that could go on and infect other cancer cells so the idea of synthetic biology to make uncle it advises done in an open framework you can engage lots of researchers and kind of build on their experience and do it for just one person at a time one of the most compelling cases was published earlier this year by the Mayo Clinic where they treated two people with resistant multiple myeloma with a measles virus they demonstrated in both pace that the measles virus targeted the cancer selectively that's great in one patient they had full remission of the cancer with a single treatment of measles virus so going from really an end-stage resistant cancer to being cancer-free is about as miraculous a result as you could expect it could be years before 3d printed viruses or a standard cancer treatment or our bones are grown in tubes our health sensors are built into us if it ever happens but these are only a few of the things that people are doing to try to change our very bodies to fix us or make us better and in a few years who knows what's going to happen