Laura Niklason is the co-founder and CEO of Humacyte. Laura's problem is this: How can you use human cells to create blood vessels that surgeons can pull out of a bag and implant into patients? Although still awaiting FDA approval in the U.S., Humacyte's vessels have already been used to treat wounded soldiers in Ukraine.
Pushkin. When the war in Ukraine broke out a few years ago, Laura Nicholson started hearing from Ukrainian doctors who were treating soldiers at frontline hospitals.
When patients would present to the hospital. In many cases, these were soldiers who had been injured in the war, typically with blast injuries and shrapnel injuries, because you know, ied explosions are really one of the you know, that's modern warfare. People lose limbs, and one of the reasons they lose limbs is because the blood flow gets damaged and cut off, and it's very hard to restore that blood flow, especially since the wounds are very contaminated. That these these limbs are filled with shrapnel and metal and soil, and it's just it's very horrific.
In some cases, the doctors were getting in touch with Laura because she and her colleagues had spent more than twenty years figuring out how to use human cells to create new blood vessels outside the human body. The idea is to create a supply of vessels that surgeons can have on hand to implant into patients. She calls these vessels havs, or human acellular vessels. The havs have not yet been approved by the FDA, but the Ukrainian surgeons thought they would be helpful, so after getting approval from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, Laura and her colleagues sent havs to several frontline hospitals in Ukraine.
So when these patients would present to the hospital, if the surgeon felt that the best treatment for that patient was using the engineered vessel to rapidly restore blood flow, he would do that. And so that means, you know, cleaning out the wound. You know, the patients asleep at this time, and they're having other injuries fixed as well, but cleaning out the wound, isolating the damaged artery and then replacing the damage segment with our engineered vessel.
And how did it go?
Well? The outcomes in Ukraine went very well. We treated a total of nineteen patients over a year long humanitarian effort, and in fact we're still following those patients now. But what we found is that in the first month, which is really the most important time after somebody gets injured, it's how things go in the first month. What we found in the first month is that of the nineteen patients we treated. Every single limb was salvaged. There was no loss of limb, there was no loss of life. And this is true even though some of the patients we treated were very badly injured. And in fact, one of the patients, the surgeon told us later that he was quite sure this man would die, but he survived and he walked out of the hospital on his own leg. So I believe in my heart that there are soldiers in Ukraine who are walking and breathing now who would not be if it weren't for the AHAV.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Laura Nicholson. She's the co founder and CEO of Humo site. Laura's problem is this, can you use human cells to create a blood vessel that is better, at least for some patients than any other options available today. Laura has both a PhD and an MD. She's worked as a physician in the intensive care unit. So to start, I asked her how she got into the blood vessel business in the first place.
Well, you know, I started working trying to grow arteries from scratch. In the mid nineteen nineties, I was training for my residency at mass General Hospital. I was taking care of patients in the operating room. I was an antithesiologist and an intensive care unit doctor, and I took care of a lot of patients who had vascular disease in their heart or their legs or elsewhere. And you know, diseases of arteries are still the biggest killers of people in the Western world, more so than cancer, more so than anything else.
Right, Sometimes we call it heart disease, right, but it's cardiovascular disease. And the vascular piece there is vessels, right.
Yes, So it can be any artery supplying any part of your body, and when those fail or clot or dilate or become infected, they need to be bypassed or replaced. And it's a universal thing in all of healthcare. And what I learned during my training is that typically when we need to repair or replace an artery, we rob Peter to pay Paul. In other words, we cut open one part of your body and take a vein out or an artery out, and then we move it over and use that vein or artery to repair the artery that's broken.
Like the classic as somebody's getting a bypass surgery for the blood vessels around their heart, and the surgeon takes vessels from their leg, right, you take vessels from the thid and you put it next to the heart.
Yes, yes, And as you might imagine, that always injures the patient in the process of trying to fix the patient. But importantly, not everybody has veins and arteries hanging around in their body that are spare, that are the right quality and the right size and shape to fix the problem at hand. And when that happens, surgeons are forced to use plastic tubes, tubes made out of teflon, for example. And as you might imagine, if you sew a teflon tube into your vein ascular system, that often doesn't work very well. It clots, it gets infected, it can be problematic. So so I became really interested during my training thirty years ago in whether or not we could make new arteries for patients that would behave like their own veins and arteries, but whether we could we could manufacture them, you know, make basically spare parts that would be available off the shelf.
How how is that idea received at that time, so.
People people viewed it as very much like science fiction, but also maybe not in a good way. So some some of my some of even my close friends, when I started working on this, they kind of stepped back and looked at me funny, like, are you really serious here? Is this something you're really going to try to do? You know, grow an artery in a jar? You know, nobody will take you seriously if you try to do that. So, yes, that was absolutely the vibe in the nineteen nineties.
So you're a medical resident, your physician, learning you know, the clinical skills you need to be a practicing physician. Then you get this idea, you want to grow blood vessels in a jar. How do you even do that? Like, they're not doing that at Mass General.
Yeah, so the idea of wanting to grow a vessel in a jar, You're right, it's not an obvious idea that pops into somebody's head. But I was fortunate enough to be able to work in the laboratory of Robert Langer, who's still a very accomplished investigator, one of the most famous investigators at MIT. And as you may know, MIT is right across the river from mass General where I was doing my residency, and Langer's lab was really one of the pioneers in developing this whole concept of tissue engineering, basically growing tissues from scratch. So I developed this sort of hybrid identity where I would do my clinical training during the day at mass General, and then after I was done with my cases, I take the subway and go across the river and then work in Langer's lab in the afternoon and evening and try to figure out how you grow an artery and a jar. So I got very excited about this and joined his lab in ninety five and worked for about three and a half years, and then was able to demonstrate and publish really the first functional engineered artery in a large animal. We published that in nineteen ninety nine, where I took cells from pigs and grew arteries for those pigs and then implanted them back and they worked, and we published that in Science and at the time that made quite a splash.
So what was the state of tissue engineering more generally at that time people do at that time?
Well, the state of tissue engineering in the nineteen nineties was really there had been some successes in what I would call sort of simpler connective tissues. So just to step back a little bit, our bodies are divided into connective tissues and non connective or organ tissues. And connective tissues are any tissues that hook one part of the body to the other, so that's skin, bone, blood, vessel, tendon, what have you. And then organs are obviously heart, liver, kidney, stuff like that. So there had been some successes even in the nineteen nineties in growing engineered tissues, for example, skin and cartilage, and in fact, engineered skin and cartilage by the mid to late nineteen nineties were already on the market, they were being used in patients, and so the early feasibility with some simpler connective tissues had really already been demonstrated by that time.
So, okay, this is whatever twenty five ish years ago. Just at the end of last year, at the end of twenty twenty three, you applied for FDA approval. You're likely to hear back in the next few months. So what were a few of the things you had to figure out to get from where you were twenty five years ago to where you are now.
So it has been a long journey. Initially we thought, oh, well, we'll take a small biopsy from a patient who needs an artery and will grow their cells, and then we'll make that patient a new artery and then give it back to them.
So it's custom, it's bespoke.
It was bespoke tissue engineering. The problem with that, though, is twofold one. It takes a long time. Yes, so if you're a patient with chest pain or.
Who just got blown up by an IED, or who just got.
Blown up by an IED, you don't really have three or four months to wait around for a new art So that's fundamentally a problem. But also what we found, and this was during some work that I did while I was still in academia at Duke University, what we found is that for older patients who have vascular disease, if we try to take those cells from those patients and grow new arteries for those patients, it actually doesn't work very well. You know, their vessels are old and their cells are old. And we found that and publish that, and we have a whole series of papers on that. But that really led us to a fundamental pivot, which was the insight that we could use young, healthy cells from humans, use those to grow arteries. But then after we grew the arteries from scratch, we would wash the cells out of the engineer tissue. And what that leaves behind is extracellular matrix, which can then be implanted into anybody.
I mean, that's essentially where you arrived and what you are doing now, right, And so I want to talk about that in a little more detail. Basically, how it works, how you make the thing that you make. So where do you start.
So we start with human cells and the cells that we use. So right now human site has banks of human cells, and in fact, we have enough cells banked to support tissue production for the next thirty or forty years. We've got a lot of cells. But where those cells come from is actually they come from organ and tissue donors. So if a patient dies and they become an organ donor, their heart might go somewhere and their liver might go somewhere else, but there's actually no transplantation use for their blood vessels. So we worked with organ procurement organizations and we obtained consent from donor families, and we obtained large blood vessels aortas from hundreds of different organ donors. We isolated cells from those donors, and then we did a tremendous amount of screening to identify which cells would really be optimal for growing new arteries, and then we established banks. So actually we have banks of donor cells now that are derived from organ donors.
So it's like vials of cells in fluid in the refrigerator or something like that.
It's vials of cells stored in liquid nitrogen, so they're extremely cold, but that means that the cells can store for decades.
Okay, so very good. That's step one. Get a lot of nice, healthy or to cells. And just to be clear, by the way, that our blood vessel cells the same in all of the vessels. Dumb question, But are the cells of the order the same as the cells in whatever other blood vessel.
The cells even within your aorta, there's different flavors of cells, and the cells differ between arteries and veins and big arteries and small arteries and capillaries. So that was really part of the challenge for us, was really identifying which subset of cells in the aortas was really the most productive for growing new arteries. As it turns out, some of the cells in your body, even if you're an older person still have this sort of progenitor or stem like capability. And those cells we found could grow extensively in our process and could grow large numbers of new arteries.
Great, so you got not only a lot of cells, you got a lot of the right kind of cells.
What do you do with them? Well, when we want to grow a batch of arteries. Right now, we grow two hundred arteries at a time in a highly automated system that we've designed and built over many years.
Artery factory.
It's an artery factory, yes, yes, In fact, we have eight installed units now. Each unit, which we call a Luna two hundred unit, can grow two hundred vessels at a time.
A unit is like a machine.
It's a machine. It's a machine. It's about as big as a school bus, and it's essentially a large incubator where we control temperature and humidity and oxygen. But we also have inside the school bus, inside the incubator, we have bioreactor systems where where we can provide an environment for the cells while they're growing, so that the cells form new arteries. But I'm sort of jumping ahead a little bit. So when we start a batch, what we do is we take a tiny vial of cells. It's about a fifth of a tea spoon. It's a little tiny volume, and we thaw out those cells and then we grow them and we let them expand about two thousandfold, and then we take we gather all those cells and then we essentially walk over to one of our production units, one of our Luna two hundreds, and in the Luna two hundred is two hundred what we call bioreactor bags. Each bag has a has a scaffold inside of it that's sterile. And that scaffold is six millimeters in diameter and forty centimeters long, So that's the size of the artery we grow.
So and it's made of like plastic or something.
It's a degradable it's a degradable plastic. It's actually it's the same material that's used in degradable sutures. So each fiber is about the width of a cell, and there's a lot of empty space in between the fibers. But this this the shape of the scaffold. We can we can shape it into this six millimeter diameter tube that's forty centimeters long. And what we do is we take the cells that we grow, and we inject them into the bag and the cells stick onto the stick, stick onto the fibers of the scaffold. It's like a person. It's like a person hanging onto a metal pole on building scaffolding. If you think of it that, that's kind of what it's like.
And so the cells are grabbing sort of all over this little plastic tube, all over the scalfeld.
Yes, each cell grabs onto a metal pole and they hang on for dear life. And then then we basically fill the bag, the bioreactor bag, with culture medium. And then that culture medium is super secret. It has lots of yummy stuff in it that convinces the cells to grow and to while they're growing, they secrete proteins like collagen and other matrix molecules. What also happens while while the cells are growing in the culture medium is we've just sign the bioreactor bag so that we can stretch the cells as if as if the cells are in the wall of an artery and they're feeling your heart beat.
Huh, because because arteries need to get wider and get narrow as the pulse of blood comes in and out. Yes, yes, so if you well, there's two different numbers in your blood pressure reading exactly.
There's a there's a higher pressure in a lower pressure. And if you put your if you put your finger on your wrist, you can feel your pulse. That pulse is your artery distending and then and then recoiling every time your heart beats. Well, it turns out we learned very early. We figured out when I was working in Langer's lab in the nineties that if we didn't stretch these cells while they were growing, they didn't really make an artery because they didn't know they were supposed.
To do that. So they would be too like rigid, they wouldn't be able to.
They would be pul they would be disorganized. Actually, they would just grow randomly because they didn't know what they were supposed to be doing.
Huh. So it's like that that pulse kind of it tells them how to grow and organize themselves. That's really interesting.
It's really interesting.
Yeah, So so you do that in the bag? How do you get them to so you have a little sort of imitation heartbeat sort of in the bag.
We have a little imitation heartbeat in the bag, Yes, and every vessel gets stretched the same amount, and they get stretched cyclically by this heartbeat for the entire two month culture duration.
So they spend two months growing and learning how to be cells in an artery and filling in all the spaces on the scaffold on the little plastic tube. What happens at the end of that two months, well, at.
The end of the two months, a couple things have happened. One is that that scaffolding, which I said is degradable, has mostly degraded, so it's like it's pretty much all gone. So what we have by that time is a human artery that has these cells and also the collagen matrix proteins that they made, and there's really no scaffold left. Huh So in a final step, we re drain out the culture medium that we use to convince the cells to grow, and then we replace it with detergents and we basically we spend five days and we washed the cells out of the artery.
Huh So, So after two months, when you take it out, it feels like it's a lot like an artery in my body, in your body, in anybody's body. But that's not good because if you put that in a patient, you'll have an immune a bad immune response. That's presumably the problem. Why you can't just use that.
That's the reason, yes, because again these are these are cells from a cell bank. So if I if I grow that artery and then I implanted in you, your body will reject it because.
It's certainly I'm getting a transplant. And so what is what is that final step or that that next step?
So the final step we call that decellularization. So we rinse away the cells, which are really the part that creates the immune rejection. But what we leave behind, and what we're very careful not to disturb, is the extracellular matrix proteins like the collagen that I mentioned, there's actually forty or fifty proteins there. The reason that's important is because it's really the collagen and the proteins that give the vessel all of its mechanical properties. So actually washing the cells out of the tissue doesn't change how strong it is. It's still just as strong as your arteries. After we wash the cells out, the cells are really there to be little protein factories, yeah right, but they themselves are not very strong.
Huh So.
But because collagen is so important, like for example, your collagen and my collagen are identical. Huh, they're identical.
You're saying, there's no kind of there's no potential immune response. It's just protein. It's just these exact same protein. You couldn't tell the difference, Yes, you couldn't tell who it came.
Your body, Yes, your body can't tell the difference. And so we've implanted these decellularized, engineered arteries into nearly six hundred patients over the last eleven years. We've never seen a single episode of rejection.
Because in an immune sense, there's nothing to reject.
That's what we believe.
Yes, so now it's like kind of like a dead artery, an artery without any personality, a generic artery. You put it in a person and a patient.
What happens then, well, there's a couple things that happened. The first thing that happens is that the artery works as it should. So the main job of arteries is to conduct blood flow so that you can get blood from point A to point B. So that happens as soon as the surgeon sews it in and takes the clamps off. So some people worry, g we wash the cells out, will.
It be leaky.
That doesn't happen. We don't see that. But what's probably cooler is that over time, sells from the patient see this naked artery and to them it sort of looks like an empty apartment building. And what we've seen happen, in fact we've published this, is that cells from the patient migrate into the acellular artery and they start off being progenitor cells, but they become vascular cells. So over a period of months, this non living thing becomes a living artery and it's the patient's own. So this is really, I think this is regenerative medicine in the truest sense.
Can you tell the difference whatever a year later, between the section of artery that you put in and the patient's own artery.
You can tell differences. There are still subtle differences. There is one there's one stretchy protein called elastin, which is in all of our arteries, but are the engineered arteries don't have elastin, So that's actually the easiest way to tell. Aside from that, there's not a lot of differences.
Does the absence of elastin make a functional difference?
It doesn't seem to. This is something that I used to worry about as a younger professor ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, but over a thousand patient years of exposure tells us that it probably doesn't matter.
It's weird that there's a thing in our arteries that we could do without. You'd think that, would you know? I like the way you know fish that live in caves for a million years don't have eyes anymore because it's costly to have eyes, and if you don't need they evolve away.
Well, I think that's the difference between having no elastin in your body, but having or not having elastin just in a short segment. So if you have no elastin in your whole body, that's actually that makes life very very hard for your heart. However, if it's just a short segment of the vessels in your body that don't have elastin, your heart doesn't care too much.
We'll be back in a minute. Laura's company, Humocite, applied late last year for FDA approval. They expect to hear back this summer, and she told me about the evidence that made her think that made the company think that they were finally ready to apply for FDA approval. For widespread use of these vessels they're creating.
So the trial that is supporting our current application at the FDA was conducted at nineteen trauma centers in the US and Israel, and we treated a total of seventy patients who had all sorts of injuries, you know, car accidents, gunshot wounds, industrial accidents. We treated a guy who worked on a farm who was crushed by a cow, We treated a woman who was crushed by a crane on a dock. I mean, just all sorts of terrible injuries. And then we followed those patients, many of them were still following, But it was really the data from that pivotal trial that showed really excellent outcomes in terms of safety, but also in terms of how well blood flow was restored and a very low number of amputations and infections. So seeing all of that clinical data together from this pivotal trial and then combined with the Ukraine exit experience, because the Ukraine humanitarian effort was ongoing at the same time we were doing this pivotal trial, So putting all of that information together is what really formed the basis of our filing with the FDA. Last year.
You mentioned that there are other options. Where do your arteries fit in this sort of you know, comparative landscape, like when is something else better? And when is one of your arteries better?
Well, this is something that you know the FDA would argue is probably their decision to make. Our argument is that in patients who don't have their own vein available, and for injured patients, it may be because their limbs are injured. It may be because the need to restore blood flow is so acute that the surgeons don't don't have that extra hour to harvest the vein. It could be that the surgeon doesn't want to injure the patient. Further so, in patients in whom vein is not feed our argument is that the hav is an excellent option. And our data showed when we compared our outcomes to outcomes of patients who are treated with plastic graphs like made out of teflon in trauma, our data showed that our outcomes are substantially better than plastic graphs.
What are some of the next things that you're working on, Like what are you trying to figure out now?
Well, on the clinical side, we have trials that are under ways that we're still collecting data on in patients with kidney failure who we're studying our engineered vessels as what we call a dialysis access, which is where our vessels are sown into the patient's arm between an artery and a vein, and then that vessel is used in the dialysis clinic where nurses poke needles into the vessel and use that so the patient can get dialysis. So we're studying that indication, and in fact, we have another pivotal trial that we expect to read out in the third quarter of this year in twenty twenty four that will tell us if the HAV works better in dialysis then basically the gold standard, which is where a surgeon sows an artery in a vein together directly.
So that's the kind of short term future. It's basically trying to trying to get the dialysis related indication. When you think more long term, if you think, I don't even know how many years that is for you, Is it five years, is it ten years?
Like?
What do you think about?
So for the last several years, we've been making smaller diameter vessels that are the right size for hard bypass, and we've actually been testing these three and a half millimeter vessels doing heart bypasses in primates, non human primates, and other large animals. And we're collecting a long term data to submit as a file to the FDA in order to gain approval to do a phase one trial in patients who need a heart bypass but who don't have their own vein to do the bypass. So we would hope to start that first in human trial in heart bypass in the next couple of years.
So bypass is a unfortunately wildly common procedure. My dad had one, my grandfather had a few, taking statins and running all the time and hopes that I'll dodge that bullet. But who knows. So presumably that would be a very large market. I mean, it's also the case that many patients are able to use their own veins. You mentioned you're thinking about patients who can't in what instances are graphs unavailable for patients getting bypassed and what do doctors now in those instances.
Well, there's lots of situations where patients who need a vein for hard bypass don't have it. So, for example, if you have varicose veins, if your veins are very dilated. Surgeons can't use them in the modern area era vein clinics are sclerosing people's veins all the time so that ladies can have beautiful legs at the beach, which is great in the short term, but not so good in the long term. And then lastly, as we know, there's a growing obesity and diabetes epidemic in the United States most of the western world. For those patients, if you cut into their legs and take their vein out, they have a higher rate of complications. Their incisions don't heal, they get infected, they have all sorts of problems.
Are there not teflon artificial veins that can be used for bypass?
There's nothing artificial that works for those small diameter vessels in your heart, despite a huge need, there simply isn't anything.
So you said that when you started out, you know, twenty five thirty years ago, making connective tissue like blood vessels, like what you're doing, seemed much easier than making solid organs. And so I'm curious, after all this time and all the advancements there have been, does making a solid organ in a lab still feel you know, wild hard it's.
Still wild, hard, but it's starting to feel tractable. So one of the parts that we haven't talked about is, you know, I've had this dual life for many years as a Right now I'm the CEO of Humusite, and I'm not an academic anymore. But for many years I sort of had one foot in academia and one foot in my company. And while I was working as a professor at Yale, we were the first lab to actually be able to grow engineered lung and implant them in rats and showed that they could exchange gas for a few hours. So we have a pathway I believe to growing more complex tissues, lungs in particular, And in fact, some of my former trainees from my labors are off scattered at different institutions working on that problem.
Right now on lab grown lungs. In lab grown lungs are lungs less complex than other organs? Is that why lungs?
Lungs are not less complex, but lungs, Interestingly, they're the only organ in your body that's mostly empty space. And in biology, in biotechnology, we're very good at growing thin layers of cells or monolayers or thin collections of cells. One of the things that we did figure out in my academic lab is that instead of using a plastic scaffold for lungs, what we can probably do is take a native lung, either a human lung or maybe a primate lung or a pig lung and decellularize that lung and use that as a scaffold. In that case, we could maybe take stem cells from the patient and repopulate that scaffold that has all of the structure of the lung, all the air sacs, all the blood vessels, all of that important lung structure. If we can repopulate that with cells, then we're basically we kind of have a leg up. We've got the lung structure to start with, and then we just repopulate it with cells from the patient, and then we've got a designer organ.
We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning Round. So I'm cognizant of the time. I just want to ask you some Lightning Round questions to finish.
That.
They will be slightly more random than the questions I've asked you so far. What's one thing you learned from Bob Langer.
I learned from Bob Langer that time is the one thing you can't get back that things cost. Getting things done cost effort, and they cost money, and they cost time. You can get more effort, and you can get more money, but you can't get more time. So he was always focused on finding the most efficient way to get something done that took the least amount of time, because, as it turns out, everything takes longer than you think it's gonna.
It's interesting to think about him that way, right because I interviewed him and I was like, how did you do so many things? And he I don't know if he knew, but like that answer that you just gave is a pretty good answer for how he did so many things. So it was what the mid nineties is that right when you started sort of getting into regenerative medicine, And I'm curious, you know, that's thirty years ago now, and I'm curious looking back now, it's sort of what you thought then. What is something that's progressed more quickly than you thought it would?
Tools tools one of the reasons that sell therapy and regenerative medicine is taking off now and we'll continue to just explode in the next couple decades is tools. We can look at a tissue that we're growing and sort of gate generate sort of a report card of here's how the cells are behaving. You know, fifteen percent of the cells are behaving correctly, eighty five percent of the cells are not doing what they're supposed to do. And I can compare that report card to what a native tissue looks like, and then I can go back and fix what I'm doing on the engineered side and just iterate that way, it allows you to make a roadmap.
What's something that has progressed more slowly than you would have thought.
I think that. I think that the development of functional connective tissues has progressed more slowly than I would have thought. The thing you do, the thing I do, the thing I do, and I'm surprised at that if we look at so as I said, in the nineteen nineties, there were approved versions of tissue engineered cartilage and tissue engineered skin that were on the market in the US or Europe.
Did those just turn out to be way easier than everything else?
Or what they are? They're easier, the tissues are simpler, and the what we would say to our design requirements are a little bit less stringent. So what has progressed more slowly than I would have thought is making tissues that have tougher design criteria and doing that successfully.
Seems like you're almost there, We're.
Almost there, But it does I've been working on it for thirty years. It does take time.
Did you feel like you were almost there ten years ago.
I felt like I was almost there twenty years ago.
But this time you mean it?
This time, I mean it? But no, I think you know. I think it's to make tissues, you have to understand the cell biology and that single cell information that I mentioned, But you also really have to come to grips with what the tissue does and what characteristics the whole tissue must have in order to function. And that's a complicated set of problems, and it takes it. You know, one person can't do it all. It takes a really terrific team working on it for a long time.
Do you think that having a founding team that was all women affected the culture of the company.
It affected a lot of things. It affected the culture of the company. Humo site has never suffered from a sense that women can't be heard in a meeting. It's actually allowed us to attract and retain incredibly smart and high powered women because they know they will never have to fight that uphill battle. So it actually gives us an edge in terms of recruitment. But in retrospect, now having been at this for nearly twenty years, I would say that in the early years, I think it made it harder for us to raise money. People write about this, and people used to ask me about it early on, and I sort of discarded it as being paranoid. But now looking back, I think it hurt us. I just think that people there's an expectation that, well, if this is an all woman company, then you know, maybe this isn't going to work.
What's one thing you wish more people understood about cells?
I wish that people appreciated how smart cells are. What do you mean, Well, what I've learned is that if I work with the right starting cells, if I give them about eight cues, not one que, but it's not a thousand ques. If I give them about eight cues, a couple of the right growth factors, right amount of stretch, you know, right temperature, right oxygen level. If I give them about eight cues, they take it and run with it, and without any supervision for me, they make a brand new artery that looks and feels like the real thing. And that's a remarkable amount of intelligence inside a little tiny cell. So our cells are very self directed, they're very smart, and in order to coax them to make spare parts, we just have to figure out what that right handful of cues is.
Laura Nicholson is the co founder and CEO of Humo site. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lydia jene Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem That's True sn