Quinton Smith realized that he could never be a physician while volunteering at the University of New Mexico’s Children’s Hospital in Albuquerque. He had chosen chemical engineering as his major, thinking it was a “cooler way to go premed.” Although he ended up in the lab instead of at the bedside, he has remained passionate about finding ways to cure illnesses. Today, his lab at the University of California, Irvine uses tools commonly used in fabricating tiny electronics to create miniature, lab-grown organs that mimic their real-life counterparts. Smith says, “Most of the time, when we study cells, we study them in a petri dish. But that’s not their native form.” By encouraging cells to assemble into 3-D structures called organoids, researchers can study diseases and test potential treatments in a new way. Scientists are now combining Silicon Valley technology and stem cell biology to “make tissues that look and react and function like human tissues,” Smith says. “And that hasn’t been done before.”
2023-05-30 06:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org
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