He means the smallest building block that, by itself, has organ-level function. “What we have been able to do is make the first vascular unit cell for lung tissue in a material that is mostly water,” Miller said. Instead of 3D-printing hard plastics or metals, Volumetric is using water-based materials to make parts that are biocompatible with the body, mimicking the water content and stiffness of human organs. Volumetric is using 3D bioprinting to create road maps for these organs. And, depending on what they do, different organs have additional roadways: The lungs move air through their airways and the kidneys move urine through the urinary tree. The same way cities need roadways to deliver food and remove waste, organs need blood vessels. He likens building an organ to building a city. It started out with $150,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator and stands to reel in more after pitching its work to investors at the accelerator's Demo Day this week.
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While others work to solve the cell-sourcing question, as Miller puts it, Volumetric is focused on the architecture those cells will be put into to become tissues, and then organs. RELATED: 3D printing lungs using blue light, hydrogel and 'yellow dye #5'Īnd that’s where Volumetric, the startup Miller co-founded with Bagrat Grigoryan, Ph.D., comes in. What’s missing, Miller says, is architecture: “If you don’t have it, you can’t get nutrients to cells and cells will die.” “But put them in 3D, in a scaffold with factors, they will die if they’re any bigger than about half a millimeter.” You can grow hundreds of billions of cells, all flat at the bottom of a petri dish,” Miller said.
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“You can grow billions of cells in a lab. Those cells need to be organized in the right way for them to work properly. But figuring out the best medium to grow cells in or the best recipe of nutrients to feed them are just pieces of the puzzle.
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Thousands of labs are working to make better cells that could eventually work the way natural organs do. But, thanks to advances in technology, he believes the field is in “striking distance” this decade. Growing new organs turned out to be a little further off than anyone thought, chiefly because “we’ve learned a lot that we didn’t know we didn’t know,” said Miller.