"There is none like it in the world today," Hendrik Viljoen tells the Omaha World-Herald.
Viljoen, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, co-founded CellGro Technologies last year with Yuguo Lei, a former UNL professor now at Penn State University.
Their company's technology is based on the idea of growing cells inside hollow tubes, much like an embryo grows inside an amniotic sac.
Within the protective environment of the tubes, the cells grow to high densities.
The work at CellGro Technologies addresses the engineering challenges to manufacture cells and increase production 10 to 50 fold, Viljoen tells the World-Herald.
For example, a skin cell from a patient can be placed into a bioreactor tube, converted to a stem cell, and changed into a retinal cell and injected into the patient's eye to treat age-related macular degeneration.
"The patient's body accepts that cell without an immune reaction because it originated as their own skin cell," Viljoen says.
CellGro is developing bioreactors of four different scales: a mini reactor about the size of a soda can that can accommodate the growth of 20 billion cells; a 1 liter bioreactor that
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