One of the highlights for our Board of Directors meetings is touring local businesses and organizations. Last week in Glencoe, we saw a Minnesota company doing incredible things in our own regional community.
Earlier this year, SWIF made an investment to help with the expansion of a manufacturing facility for Miromatrix, which is in the field of regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to damage or birth defects. This company has partnered with Midwest Porcine Recovery and is using pig livers for perfusion decellularization, or a cleansing process, which would then make them usable as a natural alternative to synthetic bio-mesh products.
President/CEO Rob Cohen described it in simpler terms by comparing it to buying a house. You find the right location and like the structure of the home but the inside just doesn’t work for you, so you strip it down to the studs and rebuild and remodel to fit your needs.
A few of us were able to gown up and enter a protective area to see the process up close and see what they are doing with live livers. It is mind-boggling to think of what this means for the future of not only technology, but also the future impact of improving health and lives. This is a true example of southwest Minnesota taking a leading edge with the convergence of biology and agriculture!
