Robotic cells to fight cancer tumors

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>> I'm Wendell Lim. I'm a cellular engineer at the University of California-San Francisco. I'm working on engineering cellular robots that can be used to search for and treat disease.

MUSIC We were inspired by the cells that our own body has. Our white blood cells are able to detect any kind of infection that we get, and they're able to move throughout the body, hone in on that, and then destroy the microbe that's infecting the body. What we realized is that perhaps we could modify these slightly and take advantage of what the cell does and make these cells now carry out functions that would be therapeutically useful. With a disease like cancer, one of the problems is finding the tumors, particularly finding metastatic tumors that are very small. And so if we can have cells that are these cellular robots, then perhaps we can have these cells go out and find them and identify them or even kill them. The way that we reprogram cells is by changing their DNA. One of the things that we're trying to do is to see if we can make cells detect some new chemical that they normally don't respond to. So what we've done is we've taken a sensor molecule called a receptor and put the gene that encodes that into these cells. And what you see is that normally the cells will ignore this red chemical, but if we now put in this blue sensor molecule which labels the cells green, you can see that these cells will now chase after that red molecule. One of the applications might be that you could load up these cells so that they carry, for example, a drug that if the cells were able to target a tumor, would deliver the drug to that tumor. I think these technologies have the potential to revolutionize medicine as we know it today. If we could make cells that were actually smart and could deliver therapeutic agents like drugs to very specific sites, then we would, in principle, be able to deliver these cargoes with very, with laser-like precision and alleviate a lot of the side effects that you see in most treatments today.

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