New Industrial Systems: Manufacturing Immortality

未来现实世界技术的发展将取决于我们理解和利用生命系统的基本原理，以及生物部分和人造材料之间直接通信的能力。DNA合成、测序和超灵敏分析技术等方面的最新进展重新点燃了人们对扩展功能材料的兴趣，将它们与来自生物的成分连接起来，模糊了生物和非生物世界之间的界限。这些生物混合系统在一系列应用领域有着巨大的应用前景，例如，感知我们环境中的毒素或污染物，诊断人类和动物的危及生命的疾病，或将药物输送到患者体内的特定位置以治疗一系列疾病，例如癌症。在这个项目中，我们建议开发创新的制造方法，以实现可靠和可扩展的可进化生物混合系统的生产，该系统具有固有的感知和修复损坏的能力，即所谓的“不朽”产品。这最终将导致产品和设备的开发，这些产品和设备在其生命周期中无需维修或更换即可继续运行。例如，想象一部手机在掉落后可以自动修复自己的屏幕，或者笔记本电脑中的电路板在短路后可以自动修复。该项目的成果有可能为我们的一些最大的社会挑战提供解决方案，并通过这样做来重振英国制造业，使其成为自我修复系统生产的世界领先者。我们建议将努力集中在三个具体的应用领域。它们是：1.电化学能源装置，例如从移动电话到电动汽车，我们日常生活所需的燃料电池和电池。消费电子产品，这是我们日常遇到和使用的许多核心技术的基础，例如计算机或电视。3.核工业和深海技术中使用的安全关键系统，例如可经得起多年使用而无需更换的深海电缆。

The development of future real-world technologies will be dependent on our ability to understand and harness the underlying principles of living systems, and to direct communication between biological parts and man-made materials. Recent advances in DNA synthesis, sequencing and ultra-sensitive analytical techniques amongst others, have reignited interest in extending the repertoire of functional materials by interfacing them with components derived from biology, blurring the boundary between the living and non-living world. These bio-hybrid systems hold great promise for use in a range of application areas including, for example, the sensing of toxins or pollutants in our environment, diagnosing life-threatening ilnesses in humans and animals, or delivering drugs to specific locations within patients bodies to treat a range of diseases, e.g. cancer. During this project we propose to develop innovative manufacturing methods to enable the reliable and scaleable production of evolvable bio-hybrid systems that possess the inherent ability to sense and repair damage, so-called 'immortal' products. This will ultimately lead to the development of products and devices that can continue to function without needing repair or replacement over the course of their life. For example, imagine a mobile phone that can self-repair its own screen after being dropped, or a circuit board in a laptop computer that can repair itself after being short-circuited. The outputs of this project have the potential to provide solutions to some of our greatest societal challenges and by doing so to reinvigorate the UK manufacturing industry by establishing it as a world leader in the production of self-healing systems. We propose to focus our efforts on three specific application areas. These are: 1. Electrochemical energy devices, e.g. fuel cells and batteries that are needed to power our everyday lives, from mobile phones to electric cars.2. Consumer electronics, which underpin many of the core technologies that we encounter and use on a day-to-day basis, e.g. computers or televisions. 3. Safety critical systems that are used in the nuclear industry and deep sea technologies, e.g. deep sea cables that can withstand many years of use without needing to be replaced.