By Tomascastelazo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
This could just make PETA, Anna Wintour, and all those leathery creatures happy – laboratory-grown leather apparel, not to mention bags and other accessories, could hit the runways in about five years, thanks to a Missouri-based startup called Modern Meadow. The company, headed by CEO and co-founder Andras Forgacs, seeks to combine regenerative medicine with 3D printing to synthetically create leather. First it will source starter cells by taking punch biopsies of donor livestock which is then proliferated into a bioreactor then it will then centrifuge these to eliminate growth medium and lump cells together in aggregated sphere. Then the 3D printing comes in, which layers cells into a cohesive structure. We’d just stop the technicalities here, but the bottomline is, as Modern Meadow promises, no animal will be harmed in the process and in as little as five years, a full scale leather production facility can be built.
