‘What we’ve done is going to change the world,’ says Melanie Matheu, chief executive of Prellis Biologics

Grabbing a helmet and lowering its thick green visor over her eyes, Melanie Matheu looked ready for battle. “We call these our Daft Punk helmets,” she said, stepping into a room lit only by a string of Christmas lights.

Machines whirred and blinked. A forest of lenses and mirrors, placed at precise angles, gave a hint of what was happening in this laboratory. “What we’ve done is going to change the world,” said Matheu. “I would bet that we’re going to be living much healthier because of this.” She was talking about lab-grown organs, built on biological “scaffolding” printed by infrared lasers.

The 40-year-old biophysicist reckons that in two to three years her start-up, Prellis Biologics in Hayward, California, could be producing surrogate kidneys implantable