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16 T M C » P U L S E | J U N E 2 0 1 9 get to this point." Taylor said that her work is on an exponential growth curve, and that she and her team feel like they are more in a process at this point than an experiment. "It's a good problem to have, but it's a hard scientific place to be," she said. It doesn't help, she added, that she chose to pursue such a complex challenge. "It's very different building a biologic device than it is building a mechanical device," Taylor said. "Biology is variable, and if you build a mechanical device, you assume it's going to act the same way every single time you build it. But if you build a biologic heart, you have to prove it's going to act similarly, with a certain degree of variability. … Not only do we have to figure out how to build a heart, but we have to figure out how to measure building a heart, which nobody's ever done before, so there aren't tools out there to do it. It's really about constantly having to rebuild everything around you, because none of it exists." In the end, Taylor is working to help keep people and their hearts as healthy as possible. "My approach to science has been: go for the home run, and if it works, great, and if it doesn't, everything you learned along the way is going to open new doors," Taylor said. Go for the home run Despite naysayers, Taylor has always believed she could rebuild an organ from the ground up. She believes in the complexity of "nature's tools" and that pre-existing structural compositions are far superior to any designed by the human hand. One of the things Taylor is most proud of is that her lab's more mature hearts are now growing fat on the outside of the muscle. "It's real," she said, adding that at this point, creating an organ is now just a matter of money and time. "It's about slogging through it right now, doing it over and over and over and improving a little bit every time," Taylor said. "But that is expensive. ... Right now, building a small, pediatric-sized humanized heart costs us sixty to seventy thousand dollars." With the right funding—Taylor said her research isn't eligible for the usual types of National Institutes of Health funding because it's not technically hypothesis-driven—Taylor could envision the technique moving quickly to preclin- ical studies. Still, she emphasized how grateful she is that THI has supported her high-risk, high-reward research. "There's a 50 year history of trying to build solutions for heart disease here," she said. "That's why I came here and that's what has enabled us to 927942_TMC_Magazine_June_Edition_AD_8.75x5.8125_v1_outlines.indd 1 5/10/19 12:27 PM It's very different building a biologic device than it is build- ing a mechanical device. Biology is variable, and if you build a mechanical device, you assume it's going to act the same way every single time you build it. But if you build a biologic heart, you have to prove it's going to act similarly, with a certain degree of variability. DORIS TAYLOR, PH.D.