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Immune system cells grown in bioreactors and used for disinfection of stuff around us

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Darko Savic
Darko Savic Jan 19, 2022
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Immune system cells grown in bioreactors and used to disinfect stuff around us (sewage plants, etc). Have them fight our battles outside of the body.
Why?
  • Reduce the use of disinfection chemicals and with that the unnecessary damage done to the environment.
  • Make biological waste like sewage safer to process/recycle.
How it works
Huge bioreactors that continuously clone suitable immune system cells and release them into municipal sewage tanks. Suitable types of cells should be able to survive for long enough to inflict some damage to our pathogens.
Questions to think about
  • Which animal has a very efficient/resilient immune system? What can we take from it?
  • Which type of cells would be useful?
  • What else could be disinfected using the same concept? Probably aanything where the immune cells could survive for long enough to find/kill some pathogens.
Synthetic biology
Could we create "perfect immune soldiers soldiers" to fight our battles outside of our bodies?
This type of experimentation should be relateively safe because the immune cells cannot survive for long outside of the body. If they manage to enter a body by mistake, they would be overpowered there.
biohazardimmunology
3
Creative contributions

Macrophage-derived substances as a safer and more effective alternative

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jnikola
jnikola Jan 26, 2022
Macrophage-derived substances as an alternative
Macrophages are a monocyte-derived population of phagocytic cells that "eat" and digest pathogens. They do it by:
  • degradative enzymes such as proteases, nucleases, and lysozyme, which digest microbes in mature acidified phagosomes
  • the production of antimicrobial peptides and reactive oxygen or nitrogen species
Why
Living cells also can't live long in dry environments and when they die, they leave detritus and potentially some non-degraded pathogens that can survive further.
Another problem is that some pathogens use macrophages in their favor. As shown by Price and Vance, all 17 pathogens from the table predominantly replicate intracellularly. Of these 17 species, at least 12 have been reported to have the capacity to replicate in macrophages. In most of these cases, macrophages are a preferential host cell in vivo.
Would it be much cheaper and more effective if we just isolated enzymes or antimicrobial peptides instead of living cells?
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Spraying the surfaces with immune spray could work

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jnikola
jnikola Jan 26, 2022
The first thing I was concerned about was the application method.
Simple "watering" of surfaces with immune cells solution would require huge volumes and would thus be too expensive. Soaking the tissue and cleaning surfaces could be too stressful for the immune cells due to mechanical abruption, but could potentially work if light pressure is applied.
The last idea was to spray the solution. Although I thought it was not feasible, I found a paper where researchers designed and tested the immune cell spray for direct lung or skin immune cell delivery. They tested the spray under several pressures and determined the adequate pressure that doesn't affect the cells' viability and morphology. The idea seems more feasible now when we know it could be applied both as a liquid and a spray.
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Great Idea, some concerns though

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Contrived _voice
Contrived _voice Jan 26, 2022
Mutation
Mutating phagocytes for use outside the body could create an entirely new threat.
Evans syndrome is a condition where white blood cells indiscriminately attack other cells, At present, it's a rare autoimmune disorder but making white blood cells more aggressive presents the possibility of them finding a way to survive in living organisms and a means of transfer too since we've opened up the possibility of them no longer needing a host. Murphy's law.
Funding
It would be a real redundancy in expense to fund this type of research when you can use the already existing means of disinfectant. We have mild disinfectant weak enough to wash your hands with and strong enough disinfectant to pickle even metal and everything in between that range
such finances could be instead chanelled to causes geared toward finding solutions to autoimune disorders and finding how they really operate
Possible solution
I do see merit however in this idea and found another way to achieve the same result without the drawbacks. An article by the International Journal of Biosensors and Bioelectronics could prove useful. It details the progress in the field of nanotechnology including bionanomotors. It's a very fascinating read.

[1]Gutierrez B, Bermúdez CV, Ureña YRC, et al. Nanobots: development and future. Int J Biosen Bioelectron. 2017;2(5):146–151. DOI: 10.15406/ijbsbe.2017.02.00037

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