Colin Kakama.

Telecytochemistry: A new paradigm for deterministic bioengineering.

By Colin Kakama.

kakamatech@gmail.com

20th November 2025.

The problem: Why current approaches to cell engineering fall short.

Events at the organism level emerge from processes at the organ level, which in turn arise from tissue-level dynamics, then cellular interactions, and ultimately the physics of molecules and subatomic particles. Thankfully, useful bioengineering doesn’t need us to have absolute control down to angstrom scales. To borrow a phrasing from my transformer architecture friends, the cell is all you need.

Cells are the most fundamental units of life. All advancements in medicine and bioengineering today come down to how reliably we can manipulate them to achieve our desired outcome. However, modern bioengineering still relies on surprisingly blunt tools. Most interventions today can be boiled down to three steps:

  1. spray a molecule or payload into cell environments (using pipettes, needles, pills, etc.)
  2. Hope it avoids the wrong cell, enters the right one and is up-taken into the right cell compartment.
  3. Hope the right chemistry happens when it reaches there.

This "spray and hope" strategy has enabled major breakthroughs, but it fundamentally lacks deterministic control. We can influence cells, but we don’t precisely orchestrate their behaviour.

The solution: What a better way of cell engineering would look like

Given the limitations of current methods, one could imagine that a better way to engineer cells would be one that enables a bio engineer to deliver anything directly to organelles without receptor binding constraints, degradation insecurities, immune system detection, off target effects and avoid any other intracellular traffic.

To achieve this, one would need full spatiotemporal control of an entire cell's chemistry. And with that the ability to manoeuvre a bioagent along x,y,z coordinates in real time to exactly where it needs to be. Turning cell engineering from a probabilistic “spray and hope” process into a deterministic, real time manipulation of 3d space.

The platform

To make precise, reliable bioengineering possible, we are developing a novel technique for remotely observing and controlling chemical reactions in cellular and tissue environments. This approach uses nanowires as antennas to drive nanoscale machines, which in turn modulate cell behaviour. A technique we are calling “telecytochemistry”

The immediate application of the platform will be nanosurgery.

Below is a conceptual illustration of the finished platform. Cheatsheet image example