New “Cyborg” Cells Could Be the Future of Medicine
17th May 2023
UC Davis researchers have created part-natural, part-artificial “cyborg” cells that might one day be engineered to do everything from fight cancer to clean up the environment.
Synthetic bio 101: Mother Nature is an excellent engineer — the human body alone contains about 200 types of cells, each precisely designed to serve a specific function while also working in harmony with all the other types.
When you add in all the other cells found in the 1.2 million identified species on Earth, you end up with a lot of perfect little biological machines — and a goal of synthetic biology is to put those machines to work.
One way to do this is by genetically engineering cells to have new abilities — this could mean modifying the single-celled organism E. coli to convert plastic waste into useful vanillin, or engineering cancer patients’ immune cells to recognize tumors.