Michale Levin on bioelectricity, regeneration, cancer treatment

How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs, with Michael Levin (Ep. 112), Big Brains Podcast, UChicago News, April 27, 2023.

"Software" for the cells:

Paul Rand: It’s kind of mind-blowing in its own way. How do the cells have these memories, if that’s the right word?

Michael Levin: Well, I think it’s the right word. I think many people probably don’t think it’s the right word, but I think it’s exactly the right word. I think you’re right. It is mind-blowing because. look, each of us makes this journey from an unfertilized [inaudible 00:07:46], which is a little blob of chemicals. You look at that little blob of chemicals and you would say, “well, this is just physics. This is just chemistry. This thing doesn’t have any goals, any intelligence, you know, you name it.” And then eventually that little blob of chemistry turns into, nine months and some years later, it turns into a being that absolutely has an inner perspective, it has goals, it has preferences, it has behavioral [inaudible 00:08:13], and it will go on to say things like, “Well, I’m not a machine I’m a human being.” Okay, great.

What’s really important to realize is that this process of development, very robust, meaning consistent, so there’s this amazing ability for life to get to the correct outcome, meaning the correct target morphology for that species, despite all kinds of crazy things, multiple copy numbers of the DNA, more cells, less cells, bigger cells, they still figure out how to get it done.

So then it makes really a lot of sense to ask, “Okay, if you’re solving this problem, if you’re going to get to the same goal despite various things that could happen to you, what are you using to remember what that goal is? You’re navigating these spaces trying to get to the correct final outcome, but how do you know what that outcome is?”

Paul Rand: Levin thinks bioelectricity is the architect building the blueprint, so to speak.

Michael Levin: These pattern memories are encoded in the electrical network of the body of the early embryo and subsequent exactly in the way that we think of as memories about navigating three-dimensional space are encoded in the brain. Now, I should point out that we, of course, we don’t know exactly how memories are encoded in the brain. We still don’t know, and there are many mysteries about that in the body as well, but I think we should get really comfortable with the idea that electrical networks store memories, they store goal states and they facilitate these complex beings to navigate space to get to those goals.

Paul Rand: As you talk about this, it’s almost like the cells are like a hardware and the electrical patterns are almost the software. Is that a fair analogy?

Michael Levin: I think that’s a very fair analogy. A lot of people don’t like that analogy because they’re visualizing hardware and software the way that they think about their laptops. But what is really powerful about that notion and what makes that analogy work really well is the idea of reprogrammability. So what’s powerful about computers is that the exact same piece of hardware can do multiple things without rewiring. And so when I give talks about this, I ask people, “Why is it that on their computer when they want to switch from Photoshop to PowerPoint, they don’t get out their soldering iron and start rewiring?” Isn’t it amazing.

Regeneration, cancer treatment:

The bigger picture here is that currently the medical model that we currently have, one of the problems with it is that it’s fundamentally unsustainable for any, no matter how many resources we have, because every advance that we make to prolong the life of a patient ends up giving you a sicker patient, that’s the baseline for the next intervention. So the better you are at extending the last stages of the lifespan, the more expensive and more heroic the next measures have to be. Inevitably, the logic of it is inescapable. And so that’s a spiral. That’s a constant spiral that is fundamentally unavoidable and unsustainable for any society unless we figure out how to crank up the regenerative process very early on so that you never get to the stage of that sinking ship that you need to keep propping up. It means that you are not just chasing symptoms, you are fundamentally, and we can talk about what that is, but we need a completely different approach to medicine that leverages literally the intelligence of the body so that the regenerative process is happening all the time.

In addition to leg regeneration, two kind of flagship applications in our group have been, first of all, the repair of birth defects. And so we were able to show that a wide range of birth defects of the brain, heart, face, and gut induced either by genetic mutations or by chemicals, can be prevented by an appropriate bioelectrical treatment that was designed by a computational model. So there’s a computational model that tells you which ion channels you would need to turn on and off to make specific patterns. And so we’ve used that to repair birth defects in the frog model. The other side is the cancer side, and we started in frogs showing that if we understand cancer to be the breakdown of the electrical signaling that normally harnesses cells towards this common anatomical purpose, so when that breaks down, they simply roll back to their amoeba-like ancient lifestyle where they just al their goals are little tiny cell level goals, which means go wherever life is good, reproduce as much as you can. Then that’s metastasis. And so we were able to show that despite really nasty human oncogenes, we could suppress to or prevent correct tumor genesis by forcing the appropriate bioelectrical states. And we started this in frog, and we are now in human glioblastoma. So we’re working to try the same thing in glioblastoma.

There's more at the link.

H/t 3QD.