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Synthetic skin seems like a “can’t miss” technology.Every year, several million people develop skin ulcersthat can’t be cured by conventional dressings andbandages. Yet most of these ulcers could be healedcompletely with the engineered tissue—“like a patch

on a tire”—in the words of Michael J. Lysaght, director of the cen-ter for biomedical engineering at Brown University (Providence,R.I.). In some cases, mostly those involving diabetics, the treatmentwould keep the patient from losing part of a foot to amputation.

Burn victims would also benefit. Every year in the UnitedStates, Europe, and Japan, as many as 45 000 people burn them-selves badly enough to need skin grafts. For extensive burns, doc-tors typically graft on skin taken from cadavers. But after a fewweeks the patient’s body usually rejects the graft, so that addi-tional applications are needed to cover the wounds and preventinfections before the patient’s own tissue starts to regenerate. Incontrast, notes writer William Leventon in this issue [p. 28], syn-thetic skin is not rejected, because it is grown from versatilecells that do not trigger a strong immune response.

So with a proven product and a big potential market, whyhave the two top makers of engineered skin, Advanced TissueSciences Inc. (La Jolla, Calif.) and Organo-genesis Inc. (Canton, Mass.), filed for Chap-ter 11 bankruptcy protection? If there is any-thing odd about them as biotech companies,it is that they have actual products and revenues.

Many of the companies’ tribulations willbe familiar to anyone who has challenged thestatus quo with a novel technology. The costof engineered skin is US $1000 for a pieceabout 20 cm2 in area; it’s not much in the con-text of the costs of surgery and post-operativecare. Nevertheless, “in today’s health-care sys-tem, things that cost more up front have aharder time getting adopted,” Lysaght notes.

But tissue engineering has come too far tobe undone by these initial financial fizzles.The Holy Grail of this field is the replacementorgan—brand new livers, kidneys, hearts, andbreasts. They are probably decades rather thanyears away, but just recently, researchers in Cam-bridge, Mass., logged a major breakthrough.

The blood supply is the fundamentalbarrier to producing three-dimensionalorgans: researchers can now sustain tissuesno thicker than about a centimeter. But tis-sue-engineering pioneer Joseph Vacanti ofMassachusetts General Hospital, working

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When Bad Things HappenTo Good Technologies

S P E C T R A L L I N E S

The Microsoft Decision

T he most significant antitrust trial in a generation ended with a whim-per on 1 November. The result was widely viewed as a triumph fordefendant Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash.), which had previouslybeen found guilty of violating U.S. antitrust laws in an action brought

by the U.S. Department of Justice, 18 U.S. states, and the District of Columbia.The District Court judge in the case, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, essentially let

stand an agreement reached among Microsoft, the Department of Justice, andnine of the states. She declined to impose the more rigorous measures thatwere being sought by the remaining plaintiffs.

In a Speakout column in this magazine last September, Stanford Universityeconomist Timothy Bresnahan argued that the agreement offered plenty of oppor-tunity for Microsoft to continue on as it has, bullying competitors and stifling theiropportunities to thrive through innovation. In this issue, however, writer RogerParloff points out that Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was to some extent preordained by theJune 2001 Appellate Court ruling that sent the case into her court for settlement.Her ruling focuses resolutely on the Windows operating system and specificallyon the ability of smaller producers to easily link their software to it. The larger issueof whether the company is using Windows to gain unfair advantage in other tech-nical categories would have to be addressed in separate suits, the judge said.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has moved rapidly to comply with the settlement’sprovisions, such as the one requiring it to appoint some of its board membersto a panel that will oversee the company’s compliance. It’s a start, anyway.•

with Mohammed Kaazempur-Mofrad at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and Jeffrey Borenstein at Draper Lab-oratory, has come up with an ingenious idea.

Here’s one of the reasons why you are reading about this in amagazine devoted to electrotechnology: the experimental tech-nique starts with Kaazempur-Mofrad’s hugely sophisticated com-puter models of blood flow in tissue. The Draper team transfersthe models’ blood-vessel patterns to silicon wafers, using much thesame photolithography and etching that makes ICs. Each of thethousands of wafers becomes a mold for one thin layer of bio-degradable plastic. Then the researchers stack the plastic layers toproduce a scaffold incorporating the models’ intricate blood-ves-sel pattern. The scaffold is then seeded with living cells to grow tis-sue—and someday perhaps an organ—blood vessels and all.

It is too soon to say whether the highly experimental tech-nique will develop into something that could save the hun-dreds of people who die every day waiting for transplantorgans. Nevertheless, it points to what will surely be one of thegreat unions of the 21st century: that of biotechnology withelectronics and computers. It is a marriage that will eventuallyremake us, some of us more literally than others. •