Caltech and Harvard Bioengineers Explain Artificial Jellyfish Research - YouTube

Learning from the Jellyfish: Squishy pumps for biomedical and engineering applications

A big goal of our study was to advance tissue engineering,” says Janna Nawroth, a doctoral student in biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and lead author of the study. “In many ways, it is still a very qualitative art, with people trying to copy a tissue or organ just based on what they think is important or what they see as the major components—without necessarily understanding if those components are relevant to the desired function or without analyzing first how different materials could be used.”

Because a particular function—swimming, say—doesn’t necessarily emerge just from copying every single element of a swimming organism into a design, “our idea,” she says, “was that we would make jellyfish functions—swimming and creating feeding currents—as our target and then build a structure based on that information.”

Their method for building the tissue-engineered jellyfish, dubbed Medusoid, is outlined in a Nature Biotechnology paper.