At the Forefront of Building With Biology

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RITU RAMAN: I'm Ritu Raman. I'm the d'Arbeloff Career Development assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. I'm actually a mechanical engineer through and through-- bachelor's, master's, PhD. And I was at MIT for my postdoc. And part of the reason I was really excited about coming here and staying here for my faculty position was because I'm really interested in translational biomedical research. And this is, of course, the global capital of that kind of work.

So I come from a family of engineers. My mom is a chemical engineer. My dad's a mechanical engineer. My grandpa is a civil engineer. And I grew up moving around a lot with them partly because of their careers. So I spent part of my childhood in Kenya, part in India, and part in different places throughout the United States. And kind of a common thread throughout those experiences was really seeing the impact that engineering careers could have on communities.

So the first example that I always give is that my first memories are growing up in Kenya watching my parents put up communication towers to connect rural villages to the global infrastructure. And it was so exciting. You'd go there. You would spend a weekend. You'd see something physical emerge as a product of innovation. And you knew that it would have a lasting positive impact on the community. And I just knew from a very early age that I wanted to have that kind of career and path in life.

One of my favorite and maybe most controversial pieces of advice that I like to give young people is don't follow your passions. I think especially as millennials, especially as young Americans, we often get this kind of advice of just follow your passions and your dreams and everything will come true and you'll be fabulous. And that's great.

But I think that's not always the most fulfilling way to think about life-- always thinking about your own self fulfillment rather than what can you do that gathers upon your skills and certainly your interests, but can also generate value for your community? And I think that's just a much more fulfilling way to live your life and something that I have found very rewarding. And so I generally encourage young people to think about their passions in that way as well.

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RITU RAMAN: So, as a mechanical engineer, I've really pushed back against the label of thinking of mechanical engineers as sort of people who just built cars and rockets from metals, polymers, and ceramics. I'm really interested in thinking about how engineers can learn how to build with biology and learn how to build with living cells, which is a field that we call bio-fabrication. And it's gaining a lot of traction in recent years.

And my lab at MIT specifically focuses on how we can build living functional materials and machines, with our first kind of area of application being building actuators powered by neurons and skeletal muscle that can teach us more about how we move around and navigate the world and also teach us how to build better robots that can [? move ?] as well. One of the reasons that my lab focuses on muscle is because it is an area of research that has so much impact on a variety of different fields, ranging from medicine to agriculture to robotics. So, for example, the big thing that our lab in the field is working on right now is thinking about whether we can create these millimeter-scale models of skeletal muscle in the lab that is innervated or essentially controlled by the motor neurons that typically sit in our spinal cords as well as the sensory neurons that kind of tell us how much are we stretching and how can we move, change, and respond to dynamic changes in our environment.

If we could recreate these kinds of systems in the lab, medical applications could include understanding disease or trauma that happens in different kind of scenarios in the real world and how we could develop new cures that restore mobility to people who have lost it. There's also some interesting other avenues of research. So if you could make meat in the lab, large volumes of meat, you wouldn't have to farm an animal and sacrifice it and waste sort of everything around the meat. You could just build meat from scratch using cells without having to sacrifice an animal.

So it could have a really big impact on agriculture, and the other application that we're really interested in is robotics. So thinking about the best robots that are out there, they're really cool. Maybe they can move, walk, and jump around a little bit, but they're very far from being able to reproduce the kinds of motions that we can generate. So if we could power robots using muscle that we make in the lab instead, that could potentially make robots that are more dynamically responsive to their surroundings.

So that's kind of an overall view of the research that we do.

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RITU RAMAN: One of the most exciting things about being at MIT and being in Boston right now is because we are really witnessing and powering the convergence of biology and engineering. We're at this really exciting space, where at the same time that biologists have learned a lot about human beings and other animals, how we're assembled at the molecular and cellular scale.

And from the engineering side, we have all these tools that teach us how we can not only understand how these processes are working inside the body, but start putting them together and building versions of them in the lab. So we're very, very lucky to be at this particular point in history and really this particular geographic location.

Because it allows us to explore the synergy between biology and engineering. And the thing that I'm really excited about, this idea of biologically powered or biohybrid engineering really dives into the question. Everything that we use in our world, whether it's our phone or our cars, they're designed for a specific purpose. And they're OK.

But say you got in an accident or you dropped your phone, you're basically paying some really expensive repair bill or replacing it entirely. But that doesn't happen in our bodies for the most part, right? We cut our skin, we heal. If we fall, we're able to heal. And I started wondering know, why aren't engineers building with the materials that have these sort of dynamically responsive capabilities?

So our goal as a field and the thing that my lab really focuses on is this idea of, can we build machines that are powered by living cells? And if we did so, would they be able to heal from damage, exercise and get stronger, learn, develop a memory and really have some of a greater impact on the technological problems that we're facing than traditional machines can do?

One of the reasons I was really excited about writing my book Biofabrication is because it's really targeted at a general audience. I think when you have an emerging field that is changing so rapidly and can affect so many different areas of industry at around the same time, you want people to be aware and be empowered and feel ready to either embrace or question that technology in a really informed way.

So I'm hoping this book kind of gives an introduction to people on different aspects of biofabrication that might affect their daily lives. So it ranges from disease models in the lab. Can we create miniature versions of our organs that could potentially develop cheaper, faster, more effective ways to test new therapeutic drugs that are perhaps personalized to individual patients?

Could you make larger versions of tissues or organs that might replace something that's diseased or broken inside of your body? Then of course, there's applications in consumer products and agriculture. So it could be things like meat. That doesn't have to be just for mammal. It could be fish or something else. Could be combined products. And even things, consumer goods like leather could be things that we might be able to biofabricate in the future.

And of course, my favorite being robotics, things like, can we develop untethered machines that could sense and process and respond to a variety of threats in the environment? So one of the big picture goals of our lab is to develop a robot, for example, that could sense a chemical toxin perhaps in a water supply. Move towards it. Release a payload to neutralize that toxin, and then self-destruct without the need to deploy any human intervention or risking any human lives.

The one thing that I'm really excited about with this book is that in addition to discussing the scientific impacts of biofabrication, we also talk about the environmental and ethical and economic impacts of this as well. And it's something that I really wanted to do so that people would have a broader idea of the impact of this field on our world.

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RITU RAMAN: So one of the best questions that has been asked of me in a talk ever, was a 10-year-old after an outreach talk to a middle school who said, well, if you're building things out of living materials, does that mean they're alive? And I think that really gets to the core of the ethical question that underlies everything that we do in the field of biofabrication in my lab, as well as broadly in the field. You're putting together living cells. And as engineers, you're really thinking of them as functional components.

So in my mind, skeletal muscle is no different than any other kind of actuator that I might use in a traditional engineering setting. However, once you start integrating components, say like neurons, or neural networks, that might be doing a little bit more of sensing, and processing, and responding, giving these robots a little bit more autonomy. That starts you know, raising maybe, some ethical or moral considerations. And then, you start saying, well, a living being is really something that can do all of these things, but can also autonomously feed itself, metabolize nutrients in its environment, and typically also reproduce. And so at some point, if you go, and are able to make a robot that's made out of living materials, that checks all of those boxes, I do think you've made something that is worthy of moral consideration, if not as a human, at least as an animal subject in the same way that we, you know, develop rules around doing animal research.

So I think we're a long ways from that. Just from a fundamental science perspective, that's a really difficult system to create. But it's something that I would like for my lab, and other researchers in the field to always keep in mind, and to always get feedback from members of the community, both in science and those in other fields.

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