This article was posted on 09/28/2012


Grow a leather jacket

Tissue engineering technology intersecting 3D printing and biology is making it possible.

In five years, you could be wearing a leather coat that was grown in a lab.

Modern Meadow, a new biotech company, has made in vitro advancements and discovered a way to combine modern medicine and 3D printing to produce animal skin and muscle without actually harming any animals.

The company hopes to bioprint meat as well, providing an alternative for meat lovers, but they will start with leather since skin production is a simpler process than meat production.

The process begins by taking biopsies from animals that are traditionally killed for their skin or meat. The extracted cells are placed in a bioreactor where they will multiply and get lumped together to create spheres. Those new clusters are then bioassembled using a 3D bioprinter. The job of the 3D bioprinter is to transform these cells into tissues. Finally, the fused parts are placed back in the bioreactor where nature takes over and they can mature into either skin or muscle. Collagen can be produced if the cells are set to become leather and muscle growth will occur if the cells are to become meat.

The company anticipates that lab-grown meat may take longer to reach the public, but for lab-grown leather it may only take up to five years before we’re fashioning more humane versions of leather jackets.

3D bioprinter. (Image via Organovo, Inc.)

Modern Meadow CEO, Andras Fargacs, was also the co-founder of Organovo, Inc., a start-up company that created the NovoGen MMX Bioprinter. The NovoGen is considered the only commercial bioprinter proven to create tissue from cells.■

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