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Artificial Jellyfish Built From Silicone and Rat Cells
ananyo writes "Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat's heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart. The team now plans to build a medusoid using human heart cells. The researchers have filed a patent to use their design, or something similar, as a platform for testing drugs (abstract). 'You've got a heart drug?' says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. 'You let me put it on my jellyfish, and I'll tell you if it can improve the pumping.'" The video that accompanies the text is at once beautiful and creepy.
Of course, you still need to test for side effects. Is a drug hepatotoxic?
'You've got a heart drug?' says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. 'You let me put it on my jellyfish, and I'll tell you if it can improve the pumping.'"
Couldn't they, I dunno, just put it in a rat?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
But as a viewer of porn I see some potential.
the artificial jellyfish will (eventually) be made of human heart cells, which will allow for different research vectors for heart medicine
I wonder how they taste fried........
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Yes. In an extraordinarily limited and uninteresting way.
The jelly moves through the water. In the heart the water moves through the jelly. Same basic action. Imagine the same device being built using human cells, especially cells from the potential patient, this chimeric pump is a first step, perhaps a major step, in building a bioelectric replacement heart or even an auxiliary heart. They sussed that bioelectric pumps work by sending an electrochemical wave front through the tissue. In principal a jellyfish and a heart have a lot in common. Especially in some people.
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There has been some research already that offers a potential there: Growing cells onto a temporary scaffold. It's still many years away from being able to grow a heart in a lab from a patient's own cells, but the possibility is there. Simpler organs are already in use that way - trachea, bladder, some others - but hearts are much more difficult. You'd still need a pacemaker though, an artificially grown heart isn't going to contain the required nerves to keep everything contracting in sync without one.
Why not?
This isn't about making artificial jellyfish, it's about creating new organisms made out of both organic and inorganic material. Regardless of use, I think this is rather awesome.
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That's funny because as a sane human being, I find creationists offensive.
Except that the heart's natural pacemakers aren't nervous, but specialized muscle cells:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA_node
The nervous system is capable of speeding the main pacemaker, but that connection isn't necessary to keep the heart beating. And the pacemakers are redundant, set at different frequencies. The highest frequency pacemaker drives the rest; should it fail, the next slower one takes over.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Ok, who wouldn't want to tell people that they worked on "The Medusoid Project?"
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It's far from a new organism. So far it's not much different from a frog corpse that moves because it's being zapped.
I doubt it self repairs itself (e.g. if you destroy one part, the other cells around will reproduce and rebuild what you destroyed). When the cells somehow help rebuild the new entity, then it is a new multicellular organism. When we've figured out how the cells figure out what and where to build, and control that, then we'll have made a lot of progress.
Even some single cells can repair themselves.
It's a small part, but it's an important one. You need to check if a potential drug can make the muscle cell work differently (mostly for drugs targeting heart cells: pump stronger).
A human heart could react in a different way. But on the other hand, this jelly fish would have a better reaction than a simple isolated cell on a petri dish.
The petri dish cell is mostly only useful to test for basic molecular response (does the ion flux increase across the cell-wall transporter when the drug is bound to it ?)
With platform like the jelly fish you can also test the effect - like cell contraction.
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