Adding another dimension to biomedicine

If you build a better mousetrap, will the world, as Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted, beat a path to your door?
Raising the stakes for the 21st century, if you build a better Petri dish, will scientists have better, quicker results in engineering new tissues, repairing damaged organs, developing new medicines and programming stem cells to treat disease?
Jeffrey Morgan is betting the answer to the latter question will be yes. For the past two years, Morgan, an associate professor of medical science and engineering at Brown University, has led a team of biomedical engineering students who have designed and built a new type of Petri dish, that humble workhorse of the biology lab.
Through a technology licensing agreement with Brown, Morgan has created a company called MicroTissues Inc. that will manufacture the new three-dimensional Petri dish – trademarked and with a patent applied for – in Rhode Island and sell it in a global market that is estimated to be worth from $100 million to $600 million, Morgan says.
The idea of improving the Petri dish – a flat, shallow, plastic receptacle used in the lab for containing and combining compounds – seems like a quirky notion. What more does this simple tool need to do?
Basic Petri dish design is more than 100 years old, and scientists have known for some time that it is an imperfect habitat for growing cells, because cells spread out on the flat plastic and adhere to it rather than to each other. “Cells grown as a thin layer on plastic do not replicate all the functions of normal tissues and organs,” Morgan wrote in a description of his project.
The new 3D Petri dish, however, is carpeted with hundreds of very tiny recesses, forcing cells into more contact with each other, where they bind and form architectures similar to that of natural tissues in the body. Also, the material of the 3D Petri dish is agarose, a natural product made from seaweed. Unlike plastic, agarose discourages adhesion to itself by cells. The combination of tiny recesses and the non adhesive agarose encourage the cells to communicate with each other and to form microtissues in the bottom of each recess.
The highly engineered dish, to be manufactured by Fielding Manufacturing in Cranston, did not spring into being like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It arose from the combined minds of people with deep knowledge of the life sciences, including an understanding of tissue engineering; knowledge of previous efforts to create specialized Petri dishes; construction and testing and revising of many trial designs of the dish; and advice gleaned through field use by biologists around the world.
This is scientific innovation, but it is creativity? “Absolutely,” Morgan said. To describe the notion of creativity as it unfolds in the labs of a world-class university, Morgan digs into his wallet for a scrap of paper containing a quote by 19th-century French scientist Claude Bernard: “Art is me. Science is we.”
The “we” of scientific innovation in today’s world requires even more than a cluster of hard-thinking biomedical engineering students and their professor. It requires think-links among scientific institutions, skilled manufacturers, sources of capital and government.
Richard Horan is senior managing director of the Slater Technology Fund, a group that seeks, identifies and supports companies that are committed to building technology-based businesses in Rhode Island. Horan said the state has a history of creative entrepreneurship, dating to Samuel Slater, who replicated British textile technology in his mill on the Blackstone River in 1793.
“Rhode Island had a robust textile and jewelry industry, but those industries and the entrepreneurship they were built upon are long since gone,” Horan said. “In the past two decades, Rhode Island is creating another entrepreneurial economy based on biological and life sciences, information technology and green technology.”
Horan pointed to some Ocean State successes in the past 30 years, including some early high-tech ventures; a commitment by the General Assembly to put money into the Slater Technology Fund; some grant programs; some tax credit programs; creation of the Rhode Island Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Brown University; and joint efforts by universities, state economic developers and some major corporations.
He said essential elements for producing innovative products in a knowledge economy include “capable entrepreneurs like Jeff Morgan and their counterparts in the commercial world”; capital formation; and ideas.
But back to the 3D Petri dish, which Morgan is now working to place in the market. Its design encourages cells to gather and communicate with each other rather than spread out and adhere to plastic. How is this a big deal?
It is a big deal in the field of regenerative medicine, which uses biomaterials and tissue engineering to repair and replace organs and tissue damaged by disease. Through this work, people can be treated for diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, burns and the loss of limbs.
Also, pharmaceutical companies use Petri dishes by the millions when they screen huge collections – or “libraries” – of compounds in the search for new drugs that fight diseases such as cancer.
And scientists are now finding that adult human cells can be reprogrammed to become embryonic stem cells, and from there, differentiated into many types of cells, which can be used therapeutically to help sick people. The 3D Petri dishes, Morgan says, can be scaled up to produce large amounts of microtissues for transplantation.
Not too shabby for the humble Petri dish. &#8226