Andras Forgacs

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“Its Ultimate Aim Is To Mass Produce Organs”

December 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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How long will our species or some next-level version of it continue to exist? If we go on long enough, it’s not theoretically impossible that humans could replace our old “parts” with new bio-printed ones. A kidney here, a kidney there, it all adds up. Or maybe they’ll be remarkably good bioengineering that will allow us to repair and upgrade what we have, regardless of its condition. I said “we,” but we actually won’t enjoy these marvels. Perhaps some future iteration of us will.

From “The Father and Son Planning Meat-Free Immortality,” Jane Wakefield’s BBC piece about the very ambitious Forgacs family: 

Organovo was set up by Hungarian-born Dr Forgacs, after he made the decision to quit his career as a theoretical physicist and retrain as a biologist – taking classes with undergraduates.

Those classes left him with a pretty lofty ambition – to grow organs that could mimic or even improve on existing ones.

He set about developing a process to print multi-cellular tissues – dubbed bio-printing – in 2005, and two years later founded Organovo with colleagues Keith Murphy and Dr Eric Michael David.

Its ultimate aim is to mass produce organs that could create a future in which humans, like cars, have regular services that keep them living indefinitely.

“If we could replace organs, we could live forever, and then it is up to us whether we want that,” he told the audience at the recent Wired conference in London.

He admits there is currently a lot of hype around bio-printing, particularly the idea of “growing” full organs.

“Bio-printing does not result in a viable biological structure. We cannot yet make big structures like livers or hearts,” he said.

“If it is possible, it will take a long time, so don’t smoke or drink too much.”•

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“We Take Cells From The Very Best Animals You Could Possibly Imagine”

April 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If we progress intelligently, we should be able to feed a much-larger world population while being kinder to animals and the environment. That can’t be done at hatching factories and the like, but perhaps biotechnology can fill the cupboard. An exchange from Techononmy between Paul Gurney of McKinsey and Andras Forgacs, co-founder of Modern Meadow, developer of cultured animal products:

Paul Gurney:

What is the advantage of removing the live animal from the equation?

Andras Forgacs:

Sure, so just by way of context, at Modern Meadow we have a food program and we have a materials program. We’re developing a way to grow leather and leather-like materials without having to slaughter animals, and we’re also developing a way of growing meat and umami savory products without having to slaughter animals. Now, that said, the animal is not completely absent from the equation, because you need to source the cells from somewhere. So, in the case of our food program, we take cells from the very best animals you could possibly imagine, the healthiest animals, and by the way the process does not need to kill the animal. So this a great way of going to the prize winning heifer, the most delicious Angus cow, taking cells from it, the cow can continue to live a very happy life.

Paul Gurney:

So you take a biopsy, basically?

Andras Forgacs:

Exactly. You take a biopsy, and then we expand those cells in very large quantities. So we’re effectively becoming the world’s most efficient mammalian cell factory. Now the advantage—and in the materials program, we actually may not ever need to go back to the animal, because we can do things at the cellular level that means we never have to go back to the animal again. But the advantage of doing that is that animals take a lot of space.

If you put all the livestock industry all together, it’s using about a third of all available land, ice-free land in the world, directly or indirectly, for grazing or for feed crops. They consume a lot of water, and they contribute to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. So by taking animals out of the equation and just relying on a much smaller donor pool of animals, the process is a lot less resource intensive. And you also have a lot more control over the process. Animals have a fairly inefficient feed conversion ratio. It takes about ten pounds of grain for a cow to produce a pound of bodyweight, and you only consume, effectively use one third of that mass for food.

Paul Gurney:

And ridiculous amounts of water, right?

Andras Forgacs:

Exactly.•

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“Postmortem Animal Tissues Are Simpler To Build And Faster To Market”

May 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Essential to seriously reducing greenhouse gases is one of these things: a voluntary diminution of meat in our diets or a lab-based version replacing the actual one. I’m a vegetarian for health reasons as well as ethical and environmental ones, so I won’t eat it anyway. But will carnivores accept a faux version it it looks and tastes pretty much like the real thing? Will it be as palatable to the mind as it is to the mouth? My guess is that epicureans will have a tough time with it, though fast-food junkies who don’t want to stretch their wallets will be amenable. (It’s a very expensive process right now but will likely eventually be cheap.) The opening of an article about futuristic farming from Jennifer Wang at Entrepreneur.com:

“Here’s a crazy idea: Combine 3-D printing and tissue engineering to ‘print’ animal products and tackle some of the planet’s biggest problems. Animal farming, after all, accounts for about half of all human-caused greenhouse gases, taking place on one-third of the available, non-frozen land on Earth. All to feed people’s appetites for 300 million tons of meat a year.

Enter Gabor and Andras Forgacs, father-and-son founders of Modern Meadow, a company they started in 2011 that may very well be the model for the farm of the future.

Five years earlier they helped start Organovo, a firm that makes human tissues for pharmaceutical research and other medical applications, and was a commercial spinoff of Gabor’s pioneering work at the University of Missouri in ‘bioprinting,’ which he describes as ‘extending biological structures in three dimensions.’ Modern Meadow’s output is based in part on this work. On a basic level, the process involves using 3-D printing to deposit clumps of cells into patterns of tissue. The particles fuse post-printing–similar to cell development in embryos. Unlike Organovo’s final products, which must be kept alive, Modern Meadow’s postmortem animal tissues are simpler to build and faster to market.”

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