Mobile decellularization lab

My goal with this lab is to create a mobile lab to repurpose wasted and unused plant and animal tissues to create pieces of decellularized tissue scaffolds. These can then be experimented with for artistic purposes. I am interested in the interaction between the body, technology and biology.  Through decellularizing tissues,  I’d like to understand what the body does with those tissues and how they interact. How could we wear these scaffolds in the future, essentially creating something from trash?  What would a device look like that we wear to decellularize tissues as we move?

This is a quick prototype of the decellularization setup. The containers that will hold the tissue being decellularized has a pump attached to allow fresh detergent solution to be pumped in.

The lab will include multiple glass or polypropylene containers to hold the detergent solution, water, and other liquids to remove the cellular contents from the tissues, tools to handle the materials, and various devices to apply the detergents with and to affect the process- possibly a diy agitator.

The process involves washing the tissue, and soaking it in a lab detergent solution (sodium dodecyl sulfate-SDS). Over time the detergent removes the cellular contents from the tissue leaving only the extra cellular matrix (ECM) remaining. The ECM is a scaffold of either collagen (from animal tissue) or cellulose (from plant tissue). This scaffold can then be used as a scaffold to grow living cells. (i won’t be reseeding the tissues)

Some inspiration:

The Pelling Lab has done extensive work with tissue decellularization- http://www.pellinglab.net/?s=decell

A scientific paper with a description of the protocol-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3084613/#!po=29.6875

a bioreactor setup at Pelling lab

a piece of decellularized steak