Cyborg Surgery

By Phil Leftwich

We are now a genuine step closer towards creating ‘cyborg engineering’, the fusing of living cells to non-living substances. A team of London scientists have developed artificial graft tissue by combining man-made materials with human cells to make an elastic, durable tissue which is able to attach to our bodies without being rejected.

Forget Robocop or the Terminator (debatable cyborg status), this is an advance unlikely to create cyborg super-soldiers anytime soon, but it is an advance with the potential to save millions of lives worldwide.

It is currently being touted as a big step towards making the use of artificial arteries and veins in coronary bypass a reality.

With half a million procedures carried out each year, bypass surgery is one of the only ways to treat coronary artery disease, the biggest killer in the United States.

During surgery a healthy vein or artery is taken from another part of the body and connected to the blocked artery bypassing the impasse. The current procedure is limited by the availability of healthy arteries and veins elsewhere in the body as well as the patient’s ability to survive their removal, coupled with considerable pain caused by the removal. These new artificial grafts make these added complications unnecessary and actually grow stronger over time as tissues become more securely attached to the graft.

Of course scientists hope that this will only be the beginning, eventually hoping that any body part could be engineered in a lab and fused to existing tissues, growing stronger the longer they are used. It may only be a matter of time before the human tissues being engineered are at least as good as the originals, if not better.

So while we may not be getting upgraded to Human 2.0 any time soon, artificial arteries and veins may soon be being used to reduce pain, recovery time and saving the lives of millions of patients.

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