“Outside the body, we can now engineer cells in all sorts of ways. For example, we can engineer them to be little factories producing medicines like hormones and therapeutic peptides in response to outside signals,” said Alex Morgan, Partner at Khosla Ventures. “However, what we can’t currently do is easily keep these foreign cells alive inside the human body. Showing that foreign cells can be kept alive for months within these implanted packets points to a possible future where instead of needing to take medications via an injection or pill, they are just made within us, as needed, from universal cell lines. Demonstration that non-fibrotic, vascularized integration can be achieved and foreign cell viability sustained is a key milestone toward this goal, although there is still a lot of work ahead.”