Xenobots combine AI and biology to create synthetic lifeforms, collections of living cells that can be designed and optimized to do useful work sensing, processing, and acting upon their physical environment. Think of them as biological robots. New York-based startup Fauna Systems wants to harness them for industry, offering Xenobots-as-a-Service as a way of solving pressing problems in human health, environmental remediation and bio-engineering.
It was among the startups pitching at XPANSE, a conference in Abu Dhabi Nov. 20-22 that focuses on impactful cutting-edge science.
“We want to commercialize Xenobots to solve real problems for industrial purposes,” says Dr. Eugene Durenard, one of Fauna Systems’ co-founders and the company’s CEO.
Xenobots were first developed by Fauna Systems co-founders Michael Levin and Joshua Bongard. Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor and co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Bongard, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont. Bongard is the co-author of the popular science books “How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence”, and “Designing Intelligence: Why Brains Aren’t Enough”. In 2007, he was named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. Levin and Bongard were among the lead authors of a 2020 paper showcasing the world’s first computer-designed living organism in collaboration with the Institute for Computer Developed Organisms. Levin and Bongard later received $8.3 million in U.S. federal funding to develop scalable manufacturing of Xenobots.
The two scientists – who serve as the startup’s co-Chief Science Officers- teamed with Lugano, Switzerland-based Durenard, a mathematician by training with experience in investing and managing life sciences companies, to form Fauna Systems and develop function-specific Xenobots for client applications by leveraging the work the two academics have been focusing on. The founders team also includes New York City-based Randy Castleman, a seasoned investor in the technology sector. This innovative technology is based on; understanding how somatic cells form bioelectrical networks for storing and recalling pattern memories that guide morphogenesis; creating next-generation AI tools for helping scientists understand top-down control of pattern regulation (a new bioinformatics of shape); and using these insights to enable new capabilities in regenerative medicine and engineering.
One of the first applications for this new form of synthetic life forms is environmental remediation, the cleanup of hazardous substances from groundwater and sediment, says Durenard. Take the case of perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), a group of widely used, man-made chemicals known as ”forever chemicals’ that accumulate over time in humans and in the environment. Fauna Systems is exploring the possibility for Xenobots to detect tiny concentrations of these molecules by engineering a kind of biological swarm where one swimming Xenobot finding such molecule would communicate to others, thus multiplying a faint signal by creating a “chain reaction”. It is like having an army of tiny living robots on call for detection and eventually clean-up duty, says Durenard. “This could be a game changer for some environmental clean-up problems” he says, because it could be faster and more efficient than methods that are currently used, such as those based on bacteria that are much smaller and may be prone to mutate and survive even when they are not needed any longer. Xenobots, biodegrade naturally within two weeks.
Fauna Systems plans to provide Xenobot services to intermediaries that contract with governments and organizations such as mines to do environmental remediation work.
Applications in medicine could include novel liquid biopsy techniques by letting these biological robots swim through a patient’s blood sample ex-vivo and instruct them to bind to cancer cells. These circulating tumor cells can then be examined by next-generation sequencing methods to sharpen single-cell diagnostics on the type of cancer a patient has,and to generally improve scientists’ knowledge of cancer cells, Durenard says.
There is potential for Xenobots to tackle other problems for industry, says Durenard. This is a whole new area of science and Fauna Systems is keen to work with large corporates to apply these biological robots for custom applications. “There is a new window of opportunity opening to apply engineered Xenobots to problems that have not been solved so far by other synthetic biology methods,” he says. This is thanks to the potential of engineering them at three levels – (1) the properties of the component cells, (2) how those cells are arranged into bodies to have certain functions and movement, and (3) the emergent properties of a swarm of communicating Xenobots. None of the syn-bio methods developed so far have such a latitude of controllable and optimizable properties.
