Image from Scientific Reports
“All right,” says David Kolesky, Ph.D. ’16. “The moment of truth.” As many times as he’s done this, there’s still always that pause. Wearing blue latex gloves and a white lab coat, Kolesky is about to see what the morning’s work has yielded. In front of him on a glass slide is a two-inch chip maybe a quarter-inch deep that he and two lab-mates spent the past few hours making: a translucent rectangle filled with a gelatinous mix of proteins and fibers mimicking the body’s extracellular matrix, the molecules that give support to living cells. And snaking through the middle of it, invisible for the moment, two tiny tubular structures, each a hundred microns or so in diameter (about the width of a human hair)—both produced on the massive black 3-D printer standing a few feet away. One of those tubes, the straighter of the two, will be transformed into a working blood vessel. The other will become something called a proximal tubule, a subcomponent of a nephron—the basic structural and functional unit of the kidney.