Silicon Valley Medicine
3D printing of organs, cellulose fabrics and rescue drones
Discovery Channel, Naked Science
From Google and Facebook to eBay and Xerox, Silicon Valley is traditionally considered one of the world's largest high–tech clusters. We are talking about three current promising projects of Silicon Valley, which in the future will save more than one thousand lives.
Salvation comes from the air
Drones from science fiction books and movies are actively becoming part of modern reality: no one is surprised by unmanned vehicles flying in parks racing, quadrocopters for photo and video shooting, delivery of goods and letters by air, territory monitoring. There are even special signs prohibiting the use of drones in a particular place, and bans always indicate the mass or prevalence of the phenomenon. Zipline specialists even claim that one day a drone can save a person's life.
In October 2016, the California robotics project Zipline, engaged in the development of drones, signed a government contract with Rwanda for the delivery of vital medicines and donated blood to hard-to-reach regions. A special distribution center was opened in the country, for which 15 Zips drones were assigned. In total, according to representatives of Zipline, in two years their unmanned aerial vehicles have made more than 5 thousand completely autonomous flights and traveled 300 thousand kilometers to deliver 7 thousand units of blood to places where a car cannot pass or a helicopter can land – the topography of Rwanda is very complex.
Zips Drone / pinterest.com
Half of the incoming requests are for women with postpartum bleeding, another third – for young children with severe anemia due to malaria, and about 20% – at the request of emergency services and rescuers. Doctors can make a request in any convenient way: call, write a message, contact via messenger. After that, a drone takes off from the distribution center, more like an enlarged toy airplane. It can accelerate up to 130 km / h, so after 15-30 minutes it arrives at a given point, drops the box (it lands with a parachute) and returns to base. Two minutes before arrival, the doctor receives an automatic message that the parcel is almost there – you can go out to meet her. Such a well–established mechanism allows you to significantly reduce the delivery time of vital medicines and donated blood - this journey usually takes four hours by car.
A package that lands with a parachute / cnet.com
Today, the company accounts for a fifth of all blood deliveries outside the country's capital, Kigali. Most recently, in April 2018, Zipline announced that it is preparing to transform and improve the delivery system: for example, the time for processing a request will be reduced from 10 to one minute, and the number of daily flights, on the contrary, will increase from 50 to 500. In addition, the project plans to launch a similar service in Tanzania and enter the US market: before that, they could not reach an agreement with government agencies, who referred to the lack of legislative instruments regulating such air transportation. Therefore, this year or next year, the expansion of the unmanned logistics industry is possible: this would greatly facilitate the life of US regions suffering from floods, droughts, tornadoes or hurricanes.
Printed edition of the organs
3D printing of organs – or bioprinting – promises to be a revolution in the field of medicine: ideally, this technology will once and for all solve the problem of queues for transplantation of donor organs. Every day, 22 people in the United States alone die without waiting for a transplant, while the queue can stretch for two to three years. In addition, there is always a risk of rejection of a new organ, even if the donor was 100% suitable. Therefore, bioprinting in the future can save thousands of lives and make a transplant, if not a routine operation, then at least quite affordable and widespread.
But this is in the future, and technology is only developing, although quite actively. Silicon Valley, as one of the most innovative scientific clusters, conducts its own research, and among the most discussed projects of recent years, Prellis Biologics can be singled out. The startup, launched in San Francisco in 2016, involves growing a new organ from cells taken from a patient: according to the idea, doctors take a biopsy, transfer it to Prellis, where special conditions are created for the reproduction of these cells. When there are a lot of them, scientists supplement them with a collagen mixture and use a laser beam to form an artificial organ.
Co-founders of the company Prellis / trueventures.com
Everything would be fine if it weren't for time – the decisive factor in matters of transplantation. According to the forecasts of Prellis specialists, it took six months to create an artificial organ, sometimes less. This, of course, is much faster than a live queue for donor organs, but patients often do not have these months. Therefore, the news that Prellis reported in June 2018 can really make a revolution in bioprinting: scientists have managed to speed up the process of printing tissues a thousand times. Prellis Biologics holographic 3D printing allows you to create complex microvascular systems that ensure the supply of nutrients and oxygen to cells. This technology is the basis for the future production of full–fledged human organs, and in the meantime, tissues are used, for example, by pharmaceutical companies for drug testing. The ultimate goal of this startup project is bioprinting the entire vascular system of the human kidney in less than 12 hours.
Holographic 3D Printing by Prellis Biologics / trueventures.com
Get ink – and print
However, many companies are engaged in bioprinting today – with varying success. But if there are 3D printers, then 3D ink is also needed - but few people think about them. The market of related products and raw materials turned out to be unoccupied – simply because it was not at all as exciting as the process of bioprinting itself. Fortunately, Eric Gatenholm, the founder of Cellink, a company that produces biochernils from human cells, took care of this issue. At the time of the launch of the project in 2015, Gatenholm was only 25 years old, but he set ambitious goals for himself – nothing less than to make a radical revolution in medicine.
Eric Gatenholm (left) and the Cellink team / 3dpnorge.no
Over the three years of its existence, Cellink has become one of the leaders in its field: if in 2014 it was impossible to purchase bio-ink on the Internet, the production volumes of the substance were minimal and required preliminary long scientific research, then with the advent of Cellink, the purchase of ink has become a common practice. The company makes the substance from cellulose – it is extracted in the forests of Sweden – and alginic acid from seaweed. What is important is standardized, universal ink: they are compatible with any type of cells. The final cost varies from nine to 299 dollars, so biochernils are available to almost everyone, even not the largest laboratories. Cellink supplies its inks and 3D printers to research centers in the USA, Europe and Asia, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and University College London.
The practical benefits of Cellink – if the company continues to develop at the same rapid pace – are obvious: universal access to materials for 3D printing will significantly accelerate the process of organ printing itself, will help to put it on stream. Even if this happens not in one decade, in the near future we can talk at least about a significant reduction in animal experiments: pharmaceutical companies will be able to use samples of real human tissue grown artificially for their tests.
3dprint.com
Although Cellink was founded in Sweden, where Gatenholm himself is from, very soon the company entered the international market and began to increase turnover – including opening a representative office in the USA. In America, she has several offices, one of which, of course, is in Silicon Valley – this is where almost all novice scientists, programmers, seekers and enthusiasts dream of getting, regardless of their professional affiliation (Gatenholm has nothing to do with either natural or exact sciences – he graduated from the Faculty of Management). It was here that Mark Zuckerberg moved from Boston at the very beginning of his journey, when he first started working on Facebook. According to experts of the Discovery Channel project "Stories of Silicon Valley", this place has a special magical culture that allows you to create the conditions in which the most breakthrough technologies of our time and, possibly, the future are born. Steve Wozniak, in his interview for The History of Silicon Valley, admitted that if he had moved to some other place than Northern California at the time, then Apple would most likely simply not have appeared. How such an ecosystem arose in Silicon Valley and why it became the center of attraction for the most progressive ideas and fantastic technologies, the program tells directly those who wrote and are still writing its history – the founders of Apple and WhatsApp, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, and many others.
Watch the program "Stories of Silicon Valley" from July 17 to Tuesdays, at 23:00 on the Discovery Channel.
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