At the Philadelphia headquarters of the biotech startup BioBots, alongside some warm beer bottles and a tangle of laptop cords, is a 12-by-12-inch white metal cube that just might be the future of drug development.
The highly specialized 3-D printer builds living tissue–skin, bone, lung and even an entire human ear. Other 3-D bioprinters do too, but at $10,000, the cost of the BioBot 1 is a 20th of that of offerings from established industry players like EnvisionTEC. Cofounders Danny Cabrera, 24, and Ricky Solorzano, 27, aim to put a BioBot on every lab bench, making research faster, cheaper and more democratic. Think Keurig for kidney tissue.
