SpiderMan Technology from Science Fiction to Reality
Transcriber: Nhung Nguyen
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Spiders.
They are fascinating creatures
and their webs are almost perfect.
They’re strong and elastic
at the same time,
the most durable material we know
and almost entirely sterile.
Since the 1980s, people have tried
to manufacture spider silk
in the lab without success.
But this man did succeed.
Thomas Scheibel.
The basic idea was simple.
From the genetic material of the spider
copy the piece of DNA
responsible for spider silk
then inserted into
the genome of some bacteria.
The bacteria produce the spider silk
protein and then it can be harvested.
Spiders are fascinating creatures.
Look at the beauty of these animals,
they come in different colors and sizes,
and we know more than 48000 species
around the world nowadays.
They live in different areas of the world,
and they produce different spider webs.
This is what we interested in.
Most of you ask probably the question,
hunt spiders dangerous?
Well, I have a clear answer to that.
I found this sign in Australia that
clearly indicates that in 2013,
almost forty five thousand
people died by cancer,
but zero incidents occurred with spiders.
And this is intriguing because
Australia is known for the most venomous
and most toxic animals,
also most toxic spiders in the world.
My interest is in spider webs.
Spiders are perfect predators and
they use spider silk for hunting prey.
This is fascinating,
Because spider silk developed
over millions of years
to be mechanically one of the most
robust materials in the world.
On the other hand, you can actually take
a spider web and put it on the wounds.
This is known since more than
two thousand years
that you can use
the spider web as a wound closure device.
So can we now use spiders
as silk producers?
You might say, of course.
But the real answer is unfortunately no,
because most spiders are cannibalistic,
which means if we bring them together
in one farm or in one box,
they start to eat each other.
And then
we just have one surviving spider.
On the other hand, in captivity,
spiders lose the ability to
make high quality silk.
The reason is we are feeding the spiders
and therefore there is no need to get
high quality silk webs to hunt prey.
So how can we access now
this fascinating spider silk?
If we cannot use the spiders
as a producer, what can we do?
Twenty years ago, we developed
a biotechnological process
which we nowadays called
the Spider Man technology.
Because we take information
from the spider,
we actually identified the genes
and now we have to design these genes
in order to make them usable
in what we call a recombinant process.
We take the genetic information,
we design it, we engineer it,
and then we introduce that with a
transporter into a host organism,
which in our case is a bacterium.
and the bacteria can now produce
tons of spider silk protein.
20 years after this development,
now, real products
made of spier silk are available.
There are cosmetic products like
skincare or hair care products,
and there is textiles like
armrests for watches.
Of course, mechanical properties are
really outstanding and very intriguing
for a lot of applications.
Now, I would like to draw your attention
to the biomedical aspects of spider silk.
I would like to take a detour because
I would like to talk about biofilms.
Nowadays, we have to deal
with a lot of pathogens
that we have in our respiratory system
or in the intestine.
If we have, they are the wrong microbes.
They might form a so-called biofilm,
which is a huge colony that protects
itself with a coverage of sugars.
And this coverage actually
prevents antibiotics
to reach the germs than microbes
and therefore they get resistant.
How can we prevent now biofilm formation
if antibiotics are not active anymore?
This can be done to so-called
nanostructure surfaces.
And here spider silk has really
outstanding properties,
because by nature, the surface structure
of silk is nanostructure.
I personally are so impressed by
the properties of spider silk,
because spider silk performs very
well in the human tissues.
Human body cells can grow on
silk without any problems.
And therefore spider silk
is a perfect scaffold
for human body cells to generate
a new tissue.
In combination with
the repellency of penetrance that
gives spider silk
bio’s selective property.
And this makes it really
a stand-alone material
for future medical applications.
Spider silk allows human tissue to grow
and repels all the pathogens without
the need of antibiotics and without
causing resistances against antibiotics.
So now this is really changing tides.
I’m fascinating that we can use the
blueprint given by the spiders.
We can take all the information
of natural spider genes.
We can design new materials in
a biotechnological process,
our spider man technology,
and then we can process these
materials into applications.
We can nowadays use spider silk materials
for skin regeneration.
We can actually heal broken nerves.
We can use bone regeneration.
And one of my favorites is
we can repair a broken heart.
And here comes a problem.
If we have a heart attack,
heart muscle tissue dies
and heart muscle cells cannot regenerate,
so they need external support.
Without any help,
there is a scar inside the heart
which actually has a huge impact
on the future function.
Therefore,
even if you survive a heart attack,
We would like to solve this problem
by removing the scar tissue with
newly generated heart muscle tissue.
And for that we need spider silk.
Because we can 3D print
spider silk scaffolds
and we can implement heart muscle cells
directly in the printing process.
This is what we call biofabrication.
In this video, you see printed spider silk
scaffolds with heart muscle cells.
The heart muscle cells have the
possibility to beat on their own,
and they’re synchronized within
the first two to three days.
In the video, you can see that
the printed construct still beat after
fifty five days of culture in the lab.
For us, this is a promise for the future
because this highlights that
we can use spider silk paste,
heart muscle tissue
for future applications
and maybe we can really
repair a broken heart.