EXPLORING THE FUTURE
IN 2012, Discover got an exciting if dizzying tour of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, then only 3 years old. Director Don Ingber led our reporter through a maze of rooms and labs, discussing and displaying a range of research projects: a
mattress to prevent sleep apnea; a cancer-fighting implant about the size of a Tic Tac; a device to speed the diagnosis of sepsis; and organs-on-chips, including a brain-on-a-chip to help study traumatic brain injury. (Ingber’s pioneering lung-on-a-chip had first been featured in Discover as one of the top science innovations of 2010.) It was like getting a tour of the future. “There’s just so much,” Ingber remarked, inviting our readers to marvel with him in the range of ongoing research.
And marvel our readers did. We got so many letters — even months after the story first appeared — that we revisited Ingber and Wyss’s work in 2015. At that time, we focused on advances in the organon-a-chip technology — then numbering as many as a dozen, mimicking everything from skin to brain and more. “The more organs they can combine, the closer they’ll be to a real human body,” we noted.
As Ingber explains in this interview, the work evolves and continues. “When you bring together brilliant minds … it allows them to look at a problem in a di erent light, finding solutions that haven’t been identified before,” he says.
It’s clear that, for Ingber and his colleagues, there is still so much to explore. We look forward to checking in with him again in the future. — The Editors