- This is a big challenge, right?
And trying to engineer something this small,
I can give you an example of one of my experiments.
So the way that we create our tubes
is actually injecting stem cells inside of a mold, right?
A hydrogel mold.
But I cannot actually see the channel or the cells
by eye at all.
To do this, what we use is a microscope.
So we have a microscope that we can put our gels,
our hydrogels in, so that we can actually see a channel
that is 250 microns in size.
And you can imagine, that's like the size of basically a hair.
So, of one hair, or maybe smaller than that.
So it's very, very small,
but the microscope basically magnifies the image
so that we can see it as big as a pencil, basically.
And then we can use a needle and inject into that channel,
and do everything under the microscope.
- If you think about the fact
that computers used to take up full rooms,
and now we're able to communicate with each other
with laptops that have all of this little microcircuitry,
we're doing really similar things.
We're using chemistry and we're using physics
in order to make smaller and smaller structures,
that can help the cells organize in the ways that we want to.