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In 2008 Doris Taylor and her team made headlines by building new rat hearts in the lab.
Heart-mending technology licensed
Doris Taylor's work moves a step closer to the market
By Deane Morrison
In 2008 University of Minnesota professor Doris Taylor garnered worldwide attention when her team created a beating animal heart in the laboratory.
Now the University has signed an exclusive global agreement with Miromatrix Medical Inc. to license the technology, which holds promise for enabling the replacement of entire human organs with nontransplantable organs. They would be created by harvesting organs from either human or nonhuman donors, stripping them of their cells, and regenerating them with cells from the recipient or a compatible donor.
"This is a major step forward for our technology commercialization efforts," says Tim Mulcahy, the University's vice president for research. Taylor's research, he says, "holds the potential to launch an entirely new industry on the scale of the medical device industry."
Miromatrix CEO Robert Cohen says the company intends to commercialize a series of products based upon her work and expects to complete its initial round of financing in the next few months.