From Lab to Life: Spare Parts for People

Last Sunday, March 8, was International Women’s Day – a day when we celebrate the achievements of amazing women and their successful struggle for equality with men – a struggle that is, alas, ongoing.  Women are still paid substantially less than men for equal work.

Here is a stellar example of what brilliant creative women can do – Professor Shulamit Levenberg, former dean of Biomedical Engineering at my university, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and head of the Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory.

Prof. Levenberg is an Orthodox Jewish woman who has six children and two grandchildren.  Her research has done amazing feats.  She has shown how to repair ailing hearts with injections of stem cells, cracking the key problem of ‘vascularization’ (providing the stem cells with a supply of blood).  She has shown how to repair the spinal cord of mice, with stem cells, enabling a paraplegic mouse to walk again – and one day, humans too!   She did her post-doc research at MIT at the famous Langer Lab (I visited the lab and met its protagonist, Robert Langer), and has followed Langer’s model, in remaining an active academic scientist while helping to spin off startups that commercialize her breakthrough research —  from lab to life has rarely been more powerful, than in Langer’s lab, and in Levenberg’s lab.  She has driven the technology of Alpha Farms (cultured meat, from a single cell of a California cow), and Neurexone, spinal cord regeneration.

The Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted her words about a recent breakthrough, 3D printing of ‘spare parts’ for humans:  “[We] produced an engineered and printed ear in its laboratory at the Technion, which will replace ears that have not developed. This means using a biological material, such as collagen, for example, or a synthetic material that has been approved for use and breaks down or dissolves in the body. We engineer these materials in the laboratory in the appropriate way, so that they will take on the appropriate three-dimensional structure of the ear, and into this we integrate the cells that exist in the body, for example cartilage cells, which we isolate from the patient and multiply in the laboratory. When the cartilage cells integrate with the three-dimensional substrate that we engineered in the laboratory, the cartilage continues to secrete its matrix, and when this entire structure is implanted in the body, the biological material with which we created the three-dimensional structure of the ear breaks down, and over time only the natural cartilage remains. The tools that bioprinting gives us have changed the field.”

And here are Professor Levenger’s words of advice and encouragement to other women:  “The path is wiser than those who walk it, and dreams must not be given up. I understood that practically I should begin my professional journey by studying biology, but in my subconscious the urge to combine engineering and medicine and use biological tools for medical purposes has never left me — and remains strong.

“You have to continue doing what you love, feel which fields you are drawn to and which are fascinating and intriguing to you, and go with what your heart tells you. Women today can choose their path and decide whether to choose the path of research and do a doctorate, and a post-doctorate and reach an academic position at a university. This journey is possible for everyone, you just have to choose and do it.”

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)