At last week’s Rose Cafe we had GRF Shiv come speak about his research and work on growing mini organs outside of the body. I had heard of this advancement in science a while back and found it fascinating, but what blew my mind was how fast it had grown and progressed into a huge and legitimized field with so much work being done in it. Shiv’s work focuses on lymph nodes, the nodes in our body that keep us clean and healthy from foreign dangers to our cells. He makes mini lymph nodes that fabricate a quantity of antibodies in 4 days that would take previous methods using mice about one year to produce. This, along with the cost-effective nature of these new methods makes this a very promising medical advancement that will likely lead to many cures in diseases and cancers in the coming future. Shiv also talked about the implications this has on personalized medicine and eventual tissue replacements once the technology progresses to that point, this would mean our individual medical experiences would be tailored to our bodies and genes, rather than in the generic way that we are treated now.

This growth in technology in this new industry left me very stunned, I could not believe that scientists and researchers had been able to accomplish such amazing things in such a short span of time. It’s quite fascinating thinking of mini tonsil-like organisms in a petri dish pumping out the very same things that my body pumps out but in less time and after being made by a human from scratch. It was very inspiring to hear Shiv’s motivations and ambitions in being a pioneer in this field, driven by joining the fight against cancer.