Scientists Create a Light-Guided Robotic Stingray Using Rat Parts

With a pinch of breast implant,

a pinch of gold, and a pinch of rat,

and we were able to make a light guided

tissue engineered stingray.

(suspenseful electro music)

My research group does cardiac diseases in children,

and one of the things we're trying to do is build a heart,

and they're a little bit challenging to build,

and so we've been thinking about building smaller pumps

that are inspired by nature.

What we did was, we made a map

of where these cells were in the stingray.

We took apart the rat, specifically a rat heart.

We worked with our friend Karl Deisseroth at Stanford,

used optogenetics, so we made these heart cells

so they can see, and they can only see

one wave length of light.

They can only see blue light.

And whenever they see blue light they will contract.

And so we rebuilt the stingray made of a polymer

called polydimethylsiloxane

which is the outer coating on the breast implant.

There's a little bit of gold because we needed a skeleton.

We needed something that would give us

some recoil of the fins and then

we build the tissues with the rat cells on top of that.

Hypothesis, the design properties of the heart cell

are gonna be fundamental to any type of muscular pump.

So we're doing a crawl, walk, run approach

to building a whole heart and so these training exercises

allow the scientists and engineers on my team

to practice their craft

and have a good controlled experiment.