Bioinspired engineering beyond homeostasis

Abstract

Biological systems operate through precisely coordinated interactions across multiple spatiotemporal scales, from molecules to cells, tissues, and organs. Pathologies often emerge when this homeostatic multiscale organization fails due to elements across different levels pursuing misaligned objectives, creating top-down and bottom-up cascading effects throughout the biological hierarchy. This perspective article explores how understanding these organizational failures provides valuable insights, besides for investigating fundamental processes in pathophysiology and for developing diagnostic and therapeutic strategies targeting biological organization with complex systems approaches, also for designing bioinspired artificial systems across three domains: biomimetic materials, bioinspired devices, and biomorphic computing models. This plethora of paradigms and possibilities is simplified by highlighting selected pathological mechanisms as case studies of multiscale system breakdown, namely, metabolic alterations, cancer, and neurodegenerative conditions, and how these failure modes of biological cooperation, taken in isolation and looked at in a systematic manner, present localized emergent advantages that might offer inspiration for developing adaptive and self-programmable systems, thereby expanding the pool of nature-inspired approaches beyond homeostasis.

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