Actuation-Augmented Biohybrid Robot by Hyaluronic Acid-Modified Au Nanoparticles in Muscle Bundles to Evaluate Drug Effects

초록

Biohybrid robots, which comprise soft materialswith biological components, have the potential to sense, respond,and adapt to changing environmental loads dynamically. Instead ofhumans and other living things, biohybrid robots can be used invariousfields such as drug screening and toxicity assessment. In theactuation part, however, since a muscle cell-based biohybrid robotis limited in that the driving force is weak, it is difficult to evaluatedrug and toxicological effects by distinguishing changes in thebiohybrid robot's motion. To overcome this limitation, weintroduced hyaluronic acid-modified gold nanoparticles (HA-AuNPs) into a muscle bundle-based biohybrid robot that movesforward in response to electrical stimulation. To enhance theactuation of muscle bundles, HA-AuNPs were embedded into the muscle bundles. The motion of the fabricated biohybrid robot wasimproved due to the enhanced differentiation and the improved electrical conductivity of muscle bundles by HA-AuNPs. In addition,the fabricated biohybrid robot exhibited huge changes in motion with respect to the addition of positive and negative inotropicdrugs. The proposed biohybrid robot has the potential for neuromuscular disease drug screening by incorporating nervous tissuessuch as motor neuron organoids and brain organoids.

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