A phone screen that heals its own crack, or a battery that repairs internal damage without human intervention—this project aims to manufacture products that can sense and fix themselves, making them effectively immortal. The problem is that everything breaks. Batteries degrade, screens shatter, and deep-sea cables corrode. Current manufacturing produces objects that inevitably fail, requiring costly repairs or replacement. This project proposes to blur the boundary between living and non-living materials, creating bio-hybrid systems that incorporate biological components—such as DNA or proteins—into man-made devices. These components would give products the inherent ability to detect damage and trigger self-repair, mimicking how living organisms heal. If successful, this could transform industries that depend on long-lasting, hard-to-replace equipment. In consumer electronics, laptops and phones could last years longer. In energy, fuel cells and batteries for electric cars could self-heal rather than degrade. In safety-critical settings, nuclear reactors and deep-sea cables could operate for decades without maintenance. The project focuses on three specific application areas: electrochemical energy devices, consumer electronics, and safety critical systems. The goal is to establish the UK as a world leader in manufacturing self-healing systems, addressing some of the biggest challenges in sustainability and infrastructure resilience.
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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.
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