"Imagine a world where, data storage is more efficient than
ever, bridges that break down repair themselves, and living
batteries generate energy from the sun," said Nina Tandon, founder
of New York based tissue engineering start-up EpiBone, speaking at
WIRED2014.
This is a world, the WIRED innovation fellow pointed out, that
we are already living in. "Every cell in your body has a voltage
across it, and mitochondria create energy from the sun. Cells break
down and repair themselves all the time."
With EpiBone, Tandon is pioneering research into how we can
manipulate these incredible properties of our cells. "We take bone
tissue, extract stem cells out of them, then engineer living issue
from your own bones to create bone grafts" she explains. "It takes
about three weeks as of now, and we can grow them at just about any
size or shape that we want. Because it's made from the patient's
own cells there's no chance of rejection." Currently working with
bovine cells, Epibone hopes to be conducting first human trials in
2016.
"We used to be in this insane paradigm, thinking that if the
bodies broken, leave it alone, but this paradigm is changing," she
said. "We started to view the body as an assemblage, a sum of parts
that can be replaced with donor organs, for example. Now
we've started drilling down deeper. Rather than viewing the body as
asset of parts we're viewing it as a collection of cells, as a vast
renewable resource."
This new way of thinking doesn't just belong to the field of
medicine. It's stimulated a rich cultural movement, as bio-artists
experiment with the creative potential contained at the cellular
level. Tandon pointed to British fashion designer Suzanne Lee who
grows textiles from bacteria, and Stanford researcher Ingmar
Riedel-Kruse who films the action of cellular organisms and
incorporates them into video games. On a larger scale she quoted
the architect and co-Founder of Terreform ONE, Mitchell Joachim who
asks, "Why are we building homes, when we should be growing
them?"
"Isn't it exciting," she concluded, "to think that if the first
industrial revolution was about machines, the second was about
information, that the third revolution could be about life
itself."
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-10/16/nina-tandon-epibone http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/k_n/Nina-Tandon-1-Wired-Michael-Newington-Gray
EpiBone: the next industrial revolution will be about life itself
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