Tissue-Engineered Leather Could be Mass-Produced by 2017
“Our emphasis first is not on meat, it’s on leather,” Forgacs says. “The main reason is that, technically, skin is a simpler structure than meat, making it easier to produce.”
The company also needs to acclimate potential customers to the idea of tissue-engineering products. It turns out that, initially at least, many consumers might not want to eat a modern technological marvel. “Anecdotally, we’ve found that around 40 percent of people would be willing to try cultured meat,” he says. “There’s much less controversy around using leather that doesn’t involve killing animals.”
They will work on growing meat in the lab while perfecting their leather process, but Forgacs expects the regulatory approval process could keep Modern Meadow burgers off the dinner plate for another 10 years. A full-scale leather production facility, on the other hand, could be up and running in five years.
Influenza: Five questions on H5N1
The biology of the H5N1 avian influenza virus is rife with paradoxes. The virus is widespread, but hard to detect. It kills more than half of the people known to be infected, but thousands of those exposed have no apparent problems. It seems to be just a few mutations away from gaining the ability to spread from person to person, but despite more than 16 years of fast-paced evolution, it has failed to do so.
This week saw the publication of the second of two papers identifying mutations that give H5N1 the ability to spread through the air between ferrets. The papers, the latest1 from a group led by Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the earlier one2 by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues, have been controversial because they offer what some see as a recipe for disaster — that they increase the risk of accidental or intentional release of a deadly human pathogen. But what is most unsettling about them, say many in the flu community, is the evidence they provide that the wild virus could spark a pandemic on its own. That threat makes the outstanding scientific mysteries about this tiny RNA virus — its genome just 14,000 letters long — even more pressing. Here are five of the biggest puzzles, and what researchers are doing to solve them.
In one paper, the team details 497 such connections, only a handful of which had been previously recognized by scientists. Disrupting these connections may interfere with HIV’s lifecycle, and the existence of so many new connections suggests there may be several novel ways to target the virus.
“Have we identified new drug targets?” said Nevan Krogan, PhD, who led the research. “I believe we have.” Pathogenic Landscape of HIV: Hundreds of Connections Between Viral and Human Proteins Identified in Work That May Reveal New Drug Targets
