Nina Tandon is CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, the world’s first company growing living human bones for skeletal reconstruction. She is the co-author of Super Cells: Building with Biology, a book that explores the new frontier of biotech. She is a TED Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Cooper Union. She has a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union, a Master’s in Bioelectrical Engineering from MIT, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and an MBA from Columbia University. Her PhD research focused on studying electrical signaling in the context of tissue engineering, and has worked with cardiac, skin, bone, and neural tissue.
Tandon spent her early career in telecom at Avaya Labs and transitioned into biomedical engineering via her Fulbright Scholarship in Italy, where she worked on an electronic nose used to “smell” lung cancer. After completing her PhD, she consulted at McKinsey and Company, but since 2010 she has continued her work in tissue engineering. Nina has published 10 journal articles (cited > 300 times, H = 9) and six book chapters, and she has three patents. She’s been published in Nature Protocols and Lab on a Chip and has been featured on CNN and in Wired and the Guardian. She has spoken three times at TED and at the Milken and Bloomberg tech conferences. She was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company, a Crain’s 40 under 40 people who have achieved success in business before turning 40, and a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer.
Nina Tandon: Growing Bones (and a Business)
Nina Tandon’s Brooklyn-based company is in an unusual and niche industry: growing human bones. In a talk at Techonomy NYC she explains why artificially grown bones make for ideal medical implementation, and how making bones also means building a business.
Nina Tandon: Growing Better Bones
Tandon: So I’m Nina Tandon. I’m from EpiBone, which is one of the Breakout Labs’ companies and, quite simply, we grow bones from stem cells. I think I’ve got five minutes, right? Deep breath. So a lot of people don’t realize that after blood transfusions, bone is the most commonly transplanted human tissue. Did you […]
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