09/15/2026
When your photopolymer ends up in a NASA-funded space biology experiment, you listen closely to what the researcher has to say about it.
Dr. Cassandra Juran, Associate Research Scientist at NASA Ames and Co-Director of SPACElab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, walked through her material evaluation process on the latest episode of Big Ideas at Β΅Scale. She was building multi-organ tissue chips to connect a brain, a liver, and a gut in a single fluidic system, sustained for six months, for a project funded by NASA, FDA, NIH, and BARDA.
The first step before any biology was figuring out whether the printed material itself could be trusted. Her initial evaluation of our Clear Microfluidics, though biocompatible, she found that is was not bio-supportive. It required hours of UV post-curing to drive off unpolymerized chemistry before it was safe to use with live tissue. That was the baseline.
When Cyto-Clear became part of the workflow, the extended curing process was no longer necessary. Dr. Juran ran cultures in Cyto-Clear printed devices alongside tissue culture treated plastic, a gold standard for her research, and she found no meaningful differences between the two. For a researcher working at the intersection of space physiology and precision biology, that consistency matters. It means custom geometries can be manufactured with confidence, without introducing variables that could compromise months of work.
That kind of independent evaluation, from researchers working at the edges of what biology and fabrication can do together, is exactly the feedback that shapes
where this technology goes next.
Watch the Full Episode ππ»https://cadworks3d.com/discover/big-ideas-at-microscale-podcast/big-ideas-at-%ce%bcscale-podcast-season-02-episode-03-how-does-human-biology-change-in-space/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=2026_podcast&utm_content=short_cassandra_yyy
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