Creating and Commercializing a Human ‘Body Cube’ for Testing New Drugs
By Mandy Esch, a project leader in the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Division at NIST
Growing up, I always had a love for living things, so I went off to college and got an undergraduate degree in biology. After that, I realized I wanted to specialize in an area that could help people live better lives and conquer diseases, so I decided to get a Ph.D. in biotechnology.
During my Ph.D. thesis, I learned to make tiny channels millionths or billionths of a meter in size where we can culture living cells. Cells organize themselves at that length-scale inside our bodies, so using technology that can guide cell organization at that scale in a microfluidic cell culture chamber helps make any engineered tissue behave more naturally.
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