You probably won’t want your holiday sweater knitted with it, but yarn grown from human skin cells could nonetheless be a crucially important invention for future tissue grafts and organ repairs. The “human textiles” have been developed by researchers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. Unlike synthetic materials which are currently used for things like sutures or scaffolds for growing tissues, skin cell yarn won’t provoke an immune system reaction that can cause inflammation in patients. Instead, they could seamlessly be woven into hosts without risk of rejection.
“We start with normal adult human cells that are grown in the lab, at the bottom of a special plastic container,” Nicholas L’Heureux, the researcher who led the work, told Digital Trends. “On that plastic, the cells will synthesize and assemble what is called an ‘extracellular matrix’ or ECM. The ECM is the basic scaffolding of practically every organ in the body. The most abundant, and best know, part of the ECM is a protein called collagen. In the right conditions, the cells will deposit a layer of ECM at the bottom of the container as a continuous sheet.”
The scientists then take this sheet — or “cell-assembled matrix” (CAM) — and cut it into ribbons of just a few millimeters width. These can be used directly as yarn or twisted into special threads with subtly different mechanical properties. The process allows the researchers to produce textiles that can be used for any of the well-known assembly approaches of the textile industry, including weaving, knitting, and braiding. In a recent proof-of-concept demonstration, the researchers used the skin-based yarn to stitch closed a wound on a rat.
“Our main goal is to produce a vascular graft made by weaving the CAM yarn,” L’Heureux continued. “We are currently building prototypes and learning more about the handling of that new material. We will soon start testing these grafts in animals so that we can eventually move to human trials for patients who need heart bypass, leg bypass, or a vascular graft for hemodialysis.”
While this work may not be quite ready for prime time just yet, related work by L’Heureux is already being used to help people. For instance, he has used his skin cell-based sheets to create a scaffold for lab-grown skin that is today being used on burn patients. It is also being utilized by L’Heureux’s colleagues to create nerve guides to repair nerve injuries, while investigations are underway for other use cases such as its use in heart valve prototypes and lab-grown ligaments for orthopedic repair.
A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.
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.