MIT engineers detach cells without damaging them, cutting biotech waste

Growing cells in labs requires them to stick to a dish — but getting them off that dish without harming them has been a stubborn problem. The standard method uses enzymes that can shred delicate cell membranes, slow down the whole process, and generate roughly 300 million liters of waste annually across the biotech industry. For therapies like CAR-T cell treatments, where you're working with irreplaceable immune cells, those enzymes can be a real liability.

Researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute just published a fundamentally different approach: use electricity instead.

A gentler way to let go

The team, led by MIT mechanical engineer Kripa Varanasi, developed a biocompatible polymer surface that responds to alternating electrical current. When they apply low-frequency voltage, the electrical field disrupts the adhesion molecules holding cells in place — in minutes, not hours. The result: over 90 percent of cells survive the detachment, compared to the cell damage and multiple processing steps required by enzymatic methods.

When they tested it on human cancer cells (osteosarcoma and ovarian cancer), detachment efficiency jumped from 1 percent to 95 percent. That's not a marginal improvement. That's a fundamental shift in what's possible.

The practical implications ripple outward. Because the method scales uniformly across large surfaces, it works for automated, high-throughput manufacturing — the kind of precision and speed that modern cell therapy production demands. There's no animal-derived enzyme to worry about when you're preparing cells for human treatment, which removes a significant regulatory and safety concern. And because the process is electrical rather than chemical, it generates minimal waste.

But the breakthrough goes deeper than just cell harvesting. The electrical interface can dynamically control the ionic environment around cells, opening doors to studying how cells communicate, screening drugs at scale, and even integrating with bioelectronic systems for personalized medicine. Varanasi describes it as "electrochemistry translated into real-world applications" — taking lab-bench control and making it industrially viable.

The team is already envisioning closed-loop, fully automated cell culture systems where cells grow, detach, and are harvested without human intervention. For regenerative medicine and cell therapies, where consistency and cell quality directly affect patient outcomes, that automation could be transformative.

This work appeared in ACS Nano in 2022, and the underlying technology is simple enough that it could move from research to manufacturing floors within a few years.