We’ve all read stories about amputees and disabled people getting 3D printed prosthetic limbs, but what if you could 3D print real body parts made from living tissue, not just plastic replacements? Sounds crazy, right? Well as far-fetched and outlandish as it sounds, this is precisely what Philadelphia-based startup BioBots is doing.
To be fair, the company definitely isn’t the first to take a stab at this idea. Researchers have been exploring biofabrication (the process of building living tissue structures) for well over a decade at this point — but BioBots founders Danny Cabrera and Ricardo Solorzano believe they’ve figured out a better way to do it.
“Our idea was we can use the same approaches that were used in the maker movement to build smaller and cheaper devices in biotech,” Cabrera said in an interview with TechCrunch. “When we looked at what was out there, we found devices that existed were huge — they looked like old mainframe computers, they took up entire rooms, they cost half a million dollars and were really difficult to operate. You needed technicians to operate them.”
Instead of using the large, outdated, and ridiculously expensive machinery that biofabrication researchers currently employ, these guys have developed a small, low-cost 3D printer that can do the job faster and more effectively. Biobots’ 3D printer uses a specially engineered ink that can be combined with living cells to build living, three-dimensional tissue structures.
The key to this process (and what differentiates the BioBots printer from other biofab machines) is the printer’s ink. It contains a special “photoinitiator powder” that cures and solidifies when hit with a certain wavelength of blue light, making it possible to build biomaterial structures without using pressure or UV light, as many existing biofabrication devices do. According to Cabrera, this method is more effective for printing living tissue because excessive pressure and UV light can both harm cells, but blue light doesn’t.
In order to print a living tissue structure, a user simply combines BioBots’ photoinitiator powder with whatever living cells they’d like to print, along with binding factors that help the cells stick together. This mixture is then placed inside the machine, which uses hydraulic pressure to push it through the extruder. Designs can be loaded onto the printer just like any other 3D printer, so users can create structure designs with the same CAD or 3D modeling software they already use.
The technology isn’t quite ready for primetime just yet, but BioBots has already produced a number of prototypes, and has been working closely with medical researchers across the country to get feedback and make improvements. The founders are currently looking to secure funding for further development.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.