When Kara Spiller, Ph.D., moved her tissue research from a lab in Europe to Drexel University, she searched Philadelphia for a 3-D printer to test her ideas on living cells.

"The one I had been using was gigantic. It filled the room, and cost $300,000. At Drexel, that would be my entire research program," Spiller told me.

Then she heard about a trio of recent Penn grads who were building 3-D printers the size of milk crates, fitted to nurture living cells. Their firm was nestled among dozens of small firms at NextFab, Evan Malone's 30,000-square-foot for-profit "gym for innovators," on Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia.

"Let's talk," Spiller told Danny Cabrera, a Havana-born 2014 Penn Engineering graduate and cofounder of the infant printer maker, BioBots.

BioBots' desktop cell printer was priced at $5,000. "I jumped right on the bandwagon," Spiller said. She was one of the first of 26 buyers - mostly academic researchers - who have bought BioBots to date. "We are developing strategies for regenerative medicine," drugs, and biomaterials that can stimulate the body to fix itself, she said.

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When cash next ran low, they approached DreamIt Health, the Philadelphia-based venture support program, through Penn Engineering professor Elliot Menschik. "They gave us $50,000, office space, and legal services" from Duane Morris, in exchange for 8 percent of the fledgling firm, Cabrera said. The lawyers "legitimized everything we were doing, incorporated us, and got us thinking about building a business. Instead of, you know, just hacking and selling things. Phase Two will be figuring out how to integrate this into pharma companies, so they can test everything from cosmetics to cancer drugs without using animals."

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