2026.05.14 Materializing safe, on-demand living therapeutics

Implantable Living Materials_Illustration: This illustration explains how the team designed Implantable Living Materials (ILMs) as a living therapeutic that uses an optimized hydrogel to safely contain synthetically engineered bacteria that are able to sense a pathogenic stimulus and respond to it by secreting a therapeutic protein within living organisms. The material itself is sufficiently “stiff” so that bacteria pushing against it from the inside can’t break it apart, and sufficiently “tough” to provide to protect the enclosed bacteria against external physical stresses. Combined with the synthetically engineered bacteria, the new approach becomes a safe and autonomous functioning drug delivery device. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University GIF caption: This video an ILM in which synthetically engineered E. coli bacteria sense a small diffusible metabolite produced by pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria and respond by self-destruction, releasing a red fluorescent protein. Surviving E. coli bacteria in the ILM then recover the population to get it ready for subsequent sense-and-respond cycles. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University