Scientists want to grow human tissue on robots for future cybernetic implants

By Heather Hamilton, contributing writer

Artificial intelligence is getting more intelligent all the time, and robots are becoming less the stuff of science fiction and more that of daily life, replacing jobs, and yes, now they’re even being considered to grow human tissue, according to an article published in Science Robotics.

Researchers at Oxford recently proposed the idea of growing human tissue on humanoid robots because they closely mimic humans in both movement and structure. Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr are biomedical researchers who are interested in how bone and tissue interact and stumbled upon the idea when they realized that they’d need a way to test lab-grown tissues in changing environments.

Image via MaxPixel.

In an interview with Digital Trends, Mouthuy mentioned that current bioreactor systems offered are in their infancy and come at a high cost. “Therefore, we have decided to look into designing our own bioreactor systems to solve this problem,” he said. While the pair has long been aware on some level of developments in robotics, especially as they relate to musculoskeletal humanoid research, they hadn’t considered further exploration.

“Musculoskeletal humanoids, which mimic the human body’s skeletal structure, are rapidly becoming better at mimicking natural body movements. We thought that investigating whether or not these robots could support the growth of tendons and other musculoskeletal tissues was now becoming both technically possible and scientifically relevant,” the pair wrote in Science Robotics.

The need for a robotic/human tissue collaboration comes from the prevalence of musculoskeletal tissue disorders and injuries in aging populations, resulting in problems with mobility. Such problems benefit from engineered tissue grafts. “Tissue engineering is enabled by the development of bioreactor systems, which control the environmental conditions necessary for maintaining living cells and tissues outside the body. They also provide chemical and mechanical stimulations that promote the differentiation of particular cell phenotypes within the tissue construct,” Mouthuy and Carr write. But to create tissue grafts that function, more advanced bioreactors are necessary. Essentially, in order to create functional tissues, those in the lab must be subjected to the same stresses experienced by actual body tissue.

Though labs have made major accomplishments in the development of human tissues in recent years, the Mouthuy and Carr point out that the chemical and mechanical stimuli needed simply aren’t there, and point to Kenshiro and Evernote as examples of humanoid robots that could serve as a basis for collaborations between roboticists and regenerative medical experts.

Because humans interact with their environment, Mouthuy and Carr expect that humanoid robots might pave the way to grafts with better functionality and more tailored properties. In Kenshiro and Eccerbot, muscles and tendons are made up of rubber-like materials activated by inelastic strings attached to spindles and motors. Other robots have pneumatic artificial muscles, which suggests to the pair that other, more human-like materials are available for use in future collaborations.

Both believe that it is possible and pertinent to explore the possibility of humanoid robots as tools for regenerative medicine, potentially leading to significant advances across a variety of areas.

“We are currently designing small bioreactor prototypes that could be used in combination with musculoskeletal robots. We hope to be able to test these in the near future,” Mouthuy said.

Sources: Sciencemag, Digitaltrends, Spectrum.ieee, and Huffinton Post