Every organ in your body started as a small cluster of identical cells. How those cells knew what to become is still one of science's great mysteries.

A group of stem cells doesn't just grow and expand. The cells self-organize, communicate, and shape themselves into three-dimensional structures that become the tissues and organs of the body. Until now, we've lacked the tools to study this process at the scale and level of detail needed to truly understand it—and then use that knowledge to build something transformative. 

We're building CellScapes: an integrated framework for how cells self-organize by combining imaging, computational modeling, and synthetic biology. Once we understand the rules, we can program them into synthetic tissues that act like miniature organs—giving researchers a new platform to study how cells behave in health, in disease, and in response to medicine.

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