 So, we are halfway through the talk sessions and so in this next session we're going to be looking and unpacking the word augment or how can we use biology and synthetic biology to improve or enhance the things that already exist. So maybe before it was a little bit about making completely new things, now it's about looking at the things that we have and improving them and augmenting them with these really great tools and technologies that we have in biological engineering. And so, to do that we're going to have four speakers in this section. The first is Pat, who's going to be talking about wearable organs and then we're going to hear from Ian Lim, the director of the MIT Design Lab, who'll be talking about wearables and a really cool collaboration with Puma. And then Ritu Rahman from the Wenger Lab will come up and speak about biohybrid materials. And then finally, we'll conclude with Deepak Mishra, who will be talking about some of the really cool work that he's doing in biological circuits. He's actually my TA for a course on that subject, so it'll be cool to hear from him. All right, great. At the speaker, as an organizer, I also feel that I need to kind of contain myself, so we kind of finish and have lunch on time. I'm Pat from the Fluid Interfaces Group and I'm going to talk about the programmable bio-digital organ. And usually I begin with dinosaur, but now I'm going to begin with space exploration. So we say that space is a final frontier of humanity. We try to augment ourselves so we can go to space. And many technology that we saw in sci-fi about space have actually inspired many technology from smartphone to Google Glass, wearable and so on. And one of the most profound technology for me is the idea of cyborg. We stand for cybernetic organisms, something that we saw a lot in science fiction. But this is actually a technical concept that was proposed by Professor Manfred Klein and Nathan Klein nine years before Apollo 11 in 1970. And the idea of cyborg is to augmenting biological organ with digital and artificial part that we put on our human body. And this is actually the concept that inspired the very, very first space suit that allowed humans to go and explore space. However, one thing about cyborg that I think is really interesting is that cyborg supposed to allow us to be free so we can explore more. So instead of having this clunky machine, we should make things kind of seamless and fluidly integrate with ourselves. So that's the philosophy of our group, the Fluid Interface, where we create technology that seamlessly sense the context and not just sense but also in between at the right moment, create the condition for the body to thrive and enhance us in multiple ways. Most of the current wearable look at electrophysiological signal, EEG, heart rate and so on. This is kind of easier to sense because it's purely electrical. The work that we are presenting and exploring here are looking at the biochemical signal, the DNA, the RNA biomarkers and so on, which are really interesting and are more difficult. However, as you see in many of the presentation, this is an emerging area that we are super excited about. So the idea of programmable organ that I'm going to present today is centered around these biochemical signals. How do we sense better and also in between in the right moment? Right now, the two projects that I'm going to present is kind of not working together yet, but this is our vision for the future. So start from sensing. There's no hospital in space. If you're sick, there is a medical officer on board that will come and put this different kind of device on you to shake your body. This is the process usually done in the laboratory whether you take the saliva, urine, blood sample and so on. But instead of having this giant lab that do multiple things, what if we can put the lab on the human body and then allow the human body to have access to all kind of information that we are actually already streaming out. And what I mean by this is that in the human body, when we sweat, when we have saliva coming out, when we pee, go to the bathroom, we release chemical from our body all the time. And this chemical can reveal about the state of the human body. We are interested in saliva particularly because as we know in Boston, we don't sweat all the time. We are kind of cold in our sweater. So saliva is something that is produced constantly and also contain chemical that we also take in. So not just measuring the body information, but also the thing that you input into your body. And saliva have been used to measure depression, fatigue, health failure, all kind of biomarkers as you see the bio fluid from the blood also diffuse to saliva. And the prototype that we are working on, we call wearable lab on the body, is a on-body fluid handling device taking saliva and put it on all kind of biosensor. Right now, the device is kind of huge, but we are working on miniaturizing it. Essentially, it has a tube that goes inside your mouth constantly taking your saliva out and places on biomarkers. As you already seen in many presentation, people are developing all kind of biomarkers to send different type of information. And what we create is a platform that you can integrate different kind of biomarker in the strip and the device will keep rolling them. So we have new sensor every time we want to do measurement and also be able to switch between different kind of sensor. If you want to sense hundred things, you just add it into the strip. So we kind of think of it as like, you know, iPhone for biosensor instead of having different device for different thing, why not having one device that you can integrate multiple sensor and have that, you know, be able to scale. And in the device, we have colorimetric sensor that convert the reaction that happened on the strip into digital concentration of different biomarkers. And we can also contextualize it with the accelerometer information that coming from the device. So we know if the person is speaking, drinking, chewing, and then use that to contextualize. If you see a high spike in glucose and you know that the person is eating something, then you know that it's probably from the food not from the body. And in the future, when there's a pandemic like this where we have coronavirus everywhere, having a lab on the body can help you kind of check whether you are being contaminated or not. And if our vision is successful, we should have something much smaller and more fluid, more fluidly integrated with the human body. This is the vision we are working toward. So now, augmentation, right? Not just the sensing. How do we intervene in the right moment? When we think about biochemical interventions, how scary is something you might think of like coming out of guttuga or to sci-fi. But it's actually something that you guys, all of you might already had earlier just in the break. When you take, you know, caffeine, drink coffee, take serotonin before going to sleep, or even taking medicine, these are compounds that our body cannot biologically produce. Right? We kind of have this biochemical input to the body to intervene and make our body kind of heal better or be more active. So what if we can have an organ that can be programmed to produce these kind of molecules to help us, you know, have a healthier lifestyle or augment our ability. So now we are kind of focusing more on the biosynthesis reactor. This is building on top of many exciting research on bioproduction where we are using leaving cell to produce all kinds of bioactive compounds from therapeutic molecule and so on. And many more molecules are being researched and have been engineered for the bacteria to produce. For example, one of the most exciting things is to produce, you know, a cannabinoid compound so we can get high, you know, so we can get more healthier. Yeah, actually this is from Ginkgo and Autogro have been looking into bioproduction of cannabinoid and molecule from this family. So what we are proposing is a wearable biosynthesis reactor, an on-body fluid device for programmable cellular manufacturing. But how do we control the cell to produce what we want, right? We need to communicate with the cell. One thing that we can be looking into in collaboration with Chris Roy Group is to use light as the medium because light can be something that digital can produce, also the cell can receive. So this genetic circuit allow the cell to be able to sense different wavelengths and activate different genetic pathway. Allowing us to have a switchable program, so not just programming bacteria to make one thing, you can now switch them using digital output, which is the light. And you can kind of switch out the output to produce kind of three different compounds, different molecules and so on. And to demonstrate this, we're using a circuit that engineered to produce three different proteins as the output. And when we kind of counter the circuit inside kind of light activated reactor, we can see that we have a corresponding protein when we shine different light on them, allowing us to digitally control gene expression. We still have some leakage problem because, you know, when we turn off the light, there's still some, you know, leakage or production, but that's something that we are working on to solve it. But essentially, the vision is not just to have synthetic biology, but have bio-digital interface that allow the cell to kind of, you know, be in communication with digital system. And we also, thanks to the support from FormLab, be able to collaborate and characterize different ways that we can integrate this, you know, digital control cell inside microfluidic channel that we can wear on the body. The ultimate vision is to have a device that you can wear like an apple watch that in the future can produce molecules to help you stay healthier and so on. We are more focused, more focusing on for astronaut because this is more an extreme environment. And in the long-term vision, we want to be able to have this closed-loop system where we can sense the state of the body and then actuate at the same time. Also, how do we enable this beyond astronaut in the future far, far away? We hope that, you know, instead of drinking the caffeine, you can produce the molecule on the body, so then you reduce the risk of overdosing and then having the personalized kind of chemical intervention for each person. Yeah, if you want to be more creative, maybe a little bit of, you know what, you know what could help. We really believe that human augmentation is something that we need to be think serious about, so our group also carefully about the ethics of our work who has the right to control your metabolism and how do we prevent people from thinking that, oh, a cell is just a computer, so human is just a group of cells, so we can treat human like computer. We want to get away from that and think that this is an enhancement of human expression rather than exploitation and, you know, there's a lot of things that we need to think about. However, biotech is still in the infancy mode, so we have a little bit more time to think about, but I encourage everyone to look at different ethical kind of argument and discussion around this. NSF has a nice report on nanotech and human enhancement that outline all the important questions we should think about when we think about augmentation and with that, you know, I would like to thank our amazing team and then support Professor Hedimahs and all my collaborators, David Kong, George Church for being on my thesis committee. You know, when we do biotech, we also have a huge team because it's good to fail together and also to succeed together as well. So with that, I end with a dinosaur. Thank you so much.