 wonderful to be here in Finland this afternoon and great to get a taste of some different weather coming from California. My name is Melanie and I founded the company Prellis Biologics and our tagline is that we are building life with light. And so I like to ask the question what is life made of? Life is made up of joy, interactions, experiences, friendships, and the families we build. But too often this is cut short. In fact right now it's worth this conference. Chances are there's a family having a meeting because a terrible diagnosis has been made and a loved one has limited options for the future. It's likely caused by one of these diseases, this diagnosis. The global population of kidney disease, the incidence of kidney disease is one in eight. That includes all of us in this room. One in eight people. We won't find out we have it until we're in our 50s or 60s and then our options are limited to. At the age of eight I was in one of these family meetings. My father was diagnosed with adult onset diabetes. This was a surprise and a man that had always taken care of his health. He approached a diagnosis with optimism and determination. He vowed it would not cut his life short and that he would live to an old age. He died two years ago due to complications that arise when type one and two diabetics daily inject themselves with insulin and sometimes don't get the diagnosis just quite right. He will never meet his grandchildren and they'll hear stories about him. He was a character. They won't hear his stories. This tragedy didn't just affect my family. Almost two billion people, actually over two billion people, are suffering from some form of progressive organ failure and they won't find out until they're in their middle age. This doesn't mean that we're doing a bad job as clinicians, physicians and researchers. In fact worldwide you are more likely to die right now from progressive organ failure or another non-communicable disease than you are a communicable disease. We're doing a great job. AIDS, malaria, influenza, they won't likely cut your life short but organ failure may. And this is why I believe it's a critical medical challenge of the 21st century. In my research I studied how cells move and interact in tissues. We did long, long nights of analysis on videos just like this one that I took. And one day when I was doing that analysis I realized the high-power ultra-high-resolution microscope that I used, it was non-toxic to cells, could be reverse engineered and used as a printer. That we could build the building blocks for organs and tissues and most critically we might be able to build microvascular. Microvascular or capillaries are fundamental building block of organs and tissues. They're 5 to 10 micrometers in diameter and no tissue is without them. Right now human tissue engineering is stalled at sheets of thin cells. We cannot print anything thicker than two sheets of paper together because we need microvascular and capillaries. And this is why we get lots of nice promises from tissue engineering like noses and ears but nothing has circulation that's useful or functional. So these capillaries, they're responsible for faring oxygen and nutrients and removing waste. And some of the larger organs like kidney, liver and lungs and the critical ones, they also play a functional role in absorption and filtration. In fact in our lungs we absorb oxygen through a single cell layer. So that means we have to get that absolutely right if we're going to print organs and tissues. Another challenge in printing organs and tissues is that there is a theoretical threshold for a functional solid organ and that is around a billion cells. We need to print those and place them in three dimensions in a way that's functional. That is a big challenge. So 3D printing has taken on this challenge but it has a critical problem, that is speed versus resolution. If you're going really fast with 3D printing your resolution is going to be low. Anyone who's done manufacturing knows this. If you go really slow you can get a higher resolution but cells have a shelf life. They will die if you spend days trying to print something. So extrusion printing is kind of the first way people have tried this. But the resolution is so low it's only 50 microns that we can't create functional microbasculature so we can't build organs and it's just it's too slow it's out of the question. So if we took a laser similar to the one I was using for imaging and we pinpoint raster scanned it around, sure it's a little faster but it would literally take years to produce a single centimeter of tissue with one micron resolution. If we project the laser as a sheet it will take days to weeks to produce a single centimeter of tissue with blood flow. This is way too long to build an organ. The fundamental inside of our company is that we're using 3D holographic projection printing. This decouples speed from resolution. We are projecting the entire image at once in 3D and wherever that laser light shines we're curing a biometrics around cells. And with a high enough laser power we can print a centimeter cubed of tissue in a matter of minutes. This is the back end of our laser system here. What you're seeing is a projection of a hologram. It's no longer a single laser beam it's been distributed over a wide area. On the other side of the screen you're watching microvascular being printed. The center image here or the center circle here is a lumen of a vasculature system that's about seven microns in diameter. Around it we are capturing cells that will settle down and produce a blood vessel. The tube that we're printing we're looking at at end on it's about 250 microns long. We can print several of these. The cells live for days. We can make them porous non porous. Anything you can put into a CAD file we can print. But how do we go from this to a full organ? That requires data. So we've partnered with another San Francisco based company called 3Scan. And they can provide microvascular data that goes down to one micron resolution. We then take this data. We clean it up. We can annotate, validate it, and then produce a CAD file that we feed into our holographic printing system. And this is what we did with this cubic structure here that we took from mouse brain. This is the vasculature system in a brain. And we went ahead and printed it. It took one of our engineers about an afternoon. And so we can recreate three dimensional structures very very quickly. The mission of our company is to become an alternative to organ donation. It's a big mission. But right now patients when they go to their doctor or a transplant center are usually told they're not a candidate for a wait list. If they do make it on a wait list they often have years to wait and they don't last. We plan to interface directly with transplant centers and provide organs within four months of a patient visiting their doctor or on demand in cases of acute injuries such as toxicity or poisoning. How will we do this? We'll take a tissue biopsy. This is our general map here. Grow and differentiate the cells. Print the organ. Functionally tested and send it back to the transplant center. I found this company last October with Dr. Noelle Mullen. She's an expert in stem cell and developmental biology. I got my degree in physiology and biophysics with a specialty in laser imaging. We built our team. We have a full team of eight people right now with several optical engineers and we've got a lot of momentum behind us. One of the most interesting questions I got as a founder is when I first started this company a friend of mine asked me how will the world be different if you succeed? And I think that's a really important question for every founder to ask themselves. And so Noelle and I thought about it for a while and we realized that if we succeed our great grandchildren will hear our stories and not because they're able to read about it or see it transcribed but because they will be able to ask us themselves. Thank you guys. We're Pella's Biologics.