Taking cues from nature isn’t new. Velcro was inspired by the way burrs attach to clothing.

Japan’s high-speed train is modeled in part on the super-aerodynamic beak of the kingfisher bird, which dives into the water for prey. “If there were no creatures flying through the air, would we have airplanes?” Karp wonders. Today, biomedical engineers are looking to the natural world to inform safe, sophisticated technologies that could help doctors treat patients more effectively and help patients heal faster. Why is nature such a good incubator for innovation? “Because every living thing—every plant, every animal, every creature that exists today—is here because it has solved an incredible number of challenges and evolved to tell the tale,” says Karp. Evolution is the best problem-solver.”

Now director of the Laboratory for Accelerated Medical Innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, he and his colleagues have invented several more creature-inspired devices.

A thumbnail-size device with tentacles made of long chains of DNA mimics the way jellyfish tentacles grab tiny prey out of the ocean: as blood flows over the device, smaller sticky DNA segments that act like hands pluck cancer cells out of the bloodstream.

Porcupine quills, which are barbed so that they penetrate easily but are hard to pull out, inspired designs for a biodegradable surgical staple that reduces leakage and bacterial infections. Other organisms or structures under observation are parasitic worms, cactus needles, and spider webs. The road from invention to product is long, expensive, and strewn with scientific, logistical, and financial hurdles. Some of these technologies are in use, others are being tested, and many others are still in the theoretical phase. Now available from a company called Skintifique, a cream to prevent nickel allergies is based on calcium carbonate particles that bind nickel and other metal allergens—“a solution already out there in nature,” Karp points out. “Phytoplankton—marine algae—are often covered by calcium carbonate shells believed to protect them from heavy metals in the ocean.”

Unlike most medical researchers, who hone in on a particular disease or set of technologies, Karp is interested in a range of medical issues where a bioengineering breakthrough could have a big impact in a relatively short time.

His lab is populated with people from different backgrounds: “every country and every expertise you can imagine—chemical engineering, biology, materials science, medicine—because innovation happens at the interface of disciplines and diversity.” Karp points out that not everyone on a team has to know all the information—“only a very small amount ends up being important, and often I’m completely unqualified”—and that only a great team makes this possible. “I like to bring people into my lab who contribute specific kinds of expertise. Then I guide the project towards maximum impact and scientific rigor.” Developing the surgical patch involved a team of clinicians working alongside experts in biomaterials, device design, and fiber optics. Not to mention inspiration from slugs, snails, and sand castle worms, whose viscous secretions stay put and repel water, just as the patch had to.

Karp points out that “it’s really hard to make progress in science unless you can look at things from different angles. Solutions are all around us in nature, staring us in the face.” The biggest challenge lies in correctly defining the problem. “Once you understand it—a big ‘if,’ because most of the time we really don’t—it’s much easier to see the connections in nature that might be relevant, and make that light bulb go off.”

An even bigger challenge, perhaps, is to choose which problem to focus on. Instinct is key, according to Karp, who believes that we can build instincts and cultivate new ones by immersing ourselves in stimulating and challenging environments. “If you don’t feel qualified, embrace the vulnerability and the challenge,” he counsels students. “That’s how you build the killer instincts that will make you as valuable as the most experienced person on the team. Take a small risk and there’s a good chance you’ll be able to succeed, which builds confidence so you can take a bigger risk next time.”

Success and failure are not opposites, and another key element is the ability to embrace failure as a problem-solving tool.

One of Karp’s lab’s early goals was to develop a technology that could infuse stem cells into the bloodstream and control their path, like a GPS for administered cell therapy, so they would reach a specific site of disease or inflammation. The team developed a five-step process that worked in an animal model, and Karp went to a big investor for funding. “The investor said, ‘This is going to make a great academic paper, but it will never help patients in its current form, because it’s too complicated. You have to do quality control at every single step in manufacturing for medical products and you’re not going to be able to scale this up. Can you work out a simpler approach?’” The lab started the next stem cell project with scale-up in mind and “radical simplicity” as a guiding design principle. Six years later, in 2015, the single-step cell engineering technology was licensed to a pharmaceutical company.

What futuristic gizmo would Karp most like to see in the lab of his dreams? “An instrument that would allow us to peer into anywhere into the human body, non-invasively, so we could visualize biology in real-time at the single-cell level during a clinical trial.” The most common way to affect a patient’s health is to administer small-molecule drugs (which are most of the pills we take). Currently, it takes billions of dollars to develop a single drug, and clinical trials often fail because it turns out to have toxic side effects, which are difficult to engineer around. “If we could administer a drug and scan the patient a few times a day to observe the molecule’s effect on different cells on the body, we could detect side effects early on, change the dose, add other combinations of molecules, and see which conditions are required to treat a condition or kill all the cells within a tumor—with minimal systemic toxicity.”

That’s one of many medical problems looking for a solution. As Karp points out, inventors can also come at it from the opposite direction. What’s an example of a solution looking for a problem? “Recently someone figured out that when cats or dogs drink, they pull the tongue back fast, which pulls the water with it. It’s putting energy into the water, adding momentum to it so it springs back into the mouth. I look at that and say ‘How can we make use of it?’ Maybe it’s ridiculous.” Maybe not. Then there’s the orchid he bought two and a half years ago at Trader Joe's, which his wife wanted to toss once it finished blossoming. Karp kept fiddling with water and fertilizer, “and lo and behold, a year later, one day a flower comes out. And now there are seven flowers. There’s so much I don’t understand,” he says happily. A botanist could explain the underlying mechanisms, of course, but that’s only a small piece of what interests the biotechnologist. “I feel like there’s a lot in there that could help us come up with better therapies and cures, if we just understood the forces that drive that orchid.”