Most people don’t think of manufacturing when it comes to biology. But new bioengineering technologies to regenerate human tissue on a commercial scale will be critical to the next phase in stem cell research.
There are considerable economic and technical challenges that come with manufacturing stem cells on a large scale. Some people could be helped tremendously by replacing diseased heart muscle cells, for example. But it takes billions of cells per patient to recreate those tissues. At the moment, we don’t have an efficient and cost-effective means of producing so many cells.