Keynote
Cells are becoming partners in design: self-healing bridges, living textiles, lab-grown bone and meat. Nina shows how growing products will transform materials, medicine, and supply chains, and what it takes to grow living products safely and at home: the biomanufacturing capacity, the safeguards, and the policy choices behind a secure bioeconomy.
The first industrial revolution taught us to shape dead matter. The next one is teaching us to collaborate with living matter. Nina's co-authored TED Book, Super Cells: Building with Biology, mapped this territory early: self-healing infrastructure, textiles that grow themselves, buildings that start as seeds. Her company turns the thesis into clinical reality every day, growing skeletal tissue in bioreactors.
For audiences in manufacturing, materials, design, and sustainability, the first half of this talk reframes biology as a production platform with fundamentally different economics: products that assemble themselves, repair themselves, and grow. Nina shows where biofabrication is already commercial, where it is five years out, and how incumbent industries can position themselves for the shift.
A platform that powerful raises the second half's question: who gets to grow the future, and how safely? Nina has built the kind of facility most biosecurity conversations are about: a cGMP cleanroom where living human bone is grown for individual patients under FDA oversight. She spoke at the White House Summit on Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing, where the bioeconomy was framed as a matter of national capacity. From that vantage point, biosecurity is a question of capacity and care: who can grow living products, where, under what safeguards, and how resilient that capacity stays when supply chains break.
Nina connects the policy conversation to the production floor: domestic biomanufacturing capacity, trained people, quality systems that make living products safe, and governance that keeps powerful biology in trustworthy hands. Audiences in industry, government, defense, and health security leave with a map of where the real vulnerabilities sit, which investments close them, and how to position for a world where the most valuable products are alive.
Watch
Proof
In this keynote, Nina Tandon takes us on an eye-popping tour of the tantalizing array of inventions already being created with nature's elemental building block, the cell.
More keynotes
AI is learning the language of cells. Nina maps the convergence of machine intelligence and living systems — from algorithm-designed tissues to biology as the next computing platform — and what it means for every industry that touches the human body.
For
What happens when replacement parts for the human body become real, and they are grown from your own cells? Drawing on the first human trials of lab-grown bone, Nina charts the path from one-size-fits-all healthcare to treatments as personal as a fingerprint, and from living longer to living fully: lifespan, healthspan, and what she calls joyspan.
For
Living bone grown from a patient's own cells was science fiction a decade ago. Today it is in human trials. Nina shares what it took to get there, from lab bench to FDA-cleared clinical trials: building teams, culture, and conviction for a product that is alive, and the lessons that transfer to anyone building something the world calls impossible.
For
Patients research, organize, invest, and demand better. Drawing on a decade of getting EpiBone's first patient to the operating room and the emails that kept arriving, Nina charts how people in pain became partners in medicine: as advocates, as investors through crowdfunding, and as participants claiming the right to try.
For
From TED to Davos, Nina translates the frontier of biology and technology into talks audiences never forget.
Keynotes are booked through The Lavin Agency. Interviews, podcasts, and campus or community talks come straight to Nina's team.