Friday, August 17, 2012

Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs Awards Three Grants

San Francisco-based Breakout Labs, the funding program run by Peter Thiel's nonprofit Thiel Foundation, said this week that it has awarded three grants--including one to a firm developing 3D, printed meat products. The awards went to Modern Meadow, which uses tissue engineering to produce meat and leather; Bell Biosystems, a firm developing technology to track therapeutics using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instruments; and Entopsis, which is developing low-cost nano-engineered products for diagnosing diseases. Each grant is worth up to $350,000. Breakout Labs said it has now awarded a total of nine grants. Modern Meadow's project is particularly interesting, and is aimed at commercializing bioprinting, a method of creating tissues and organs using computer control; that technique was previously the domain of science fiction, and is being aimed at creating edible, cultured meat aimed at feeding humans.