At Gotham Foundry’s Sept. 22 launch event, leaders from across New York City gathered at Columbia’s Jerome L. Greene Science Center for the exciting debut, which included a biomaterials exhibition, a fashion show of bio-derived designs, and remarks from Gotham Foundry Director Helen Lu; Columbia University Provost Angela Olinto; Andrew Kimball, CEO of NYCEDC; Adolfo Carrión, Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development and Workforce; Dr. Joyce F. Brown, president, FIT; Rosemarie Wesson, associate vice chancellor and university vice provost for Research at CUNY; and Neena Chakrabarti, PhD, who spoke on behalf of Genspace; as well as Janet Rodriguez, founder and CEO of SoHarlem.

Community partners from Harlem Biospace and Communitas America were also in attendance, along with faculty from the Gotham Foundry Materials Innovation Team, a transdisciplinary network of engineering and science faculty at Columbia, CUNY, and FIT. 

The featured materials exhibit, “Regenerative Vision,” showcased the work of more than 30 start-ups and research teams, demonstrating the transformative power of regenerative materials and green manufacturing approach in the industries Gotham Foundry will initially target: fashion textiles, construction, and healthcare. The event closed with young designers from SoHarlem, an incubator for cultural industries, sporting green fashions they had created as part of their entrepreneurship program with legendary designer Dapper Dan.

Gotham Foundry is initially located at Harlem Biospace at the Mink building in West Harlem. Its permanent home will be in a new Columbia Engineering building on the Manhattanville campus—currently in planning, and set to break ground in 2027 and open in 2030.

“We are thrilled to launch the Gotham Foundry with our partners and the support of the NYCEDC, led by Professor Helen Lu, a true pioneer in regenerative materials,” said Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of Columbia Engineering. “We are looking forward to creating a leading hub for biofabrication and the circular economy as part of a growing innovation ecosystem in Upper Manhattan, bringing together our own history of breakthrough research in sustainability with other academic researchers, industry innovators, and community partners in job training and education.”

“A bold vision for our future is that all human-made products emulate nature’s circular life cycle by demonstrating desired performance and being fully regenerative or degradable at the end of service. Establishment of Gotham Foundry is a major step in fulfilling this vision,” said Lu. “We are so grateful to the NYCEDC for supporting this project and our partners for their ongoing collaboration and commitment. We are eager to seize this opportunity to build a more sustainable future through the promise of novel regenerative materials, while boosting the city’s economy and training a skilled future manufacturing workforce.”

Today, the global market for sustainable materials is valued at $358 billion and is expected to grow to $800 billion by 2032. Advancing innovation in sustainable and biomaterials has the potential to transform key industries that drive New York City's economy, from fashion and construction to plastics and medical supplies. Researchers at Columbia and partner institutions will collectively share their knowledge and rich expertise to bring new materials innovations to industry and consumers. Gotham Foundry will serve as an ecosystem for innovation to fuel a green economy, not just for R&D but to cultivate startups, for education, training, and workforce development, and to become the centralized space open to creators and designers who seek access to a state-of-the-art facility and its resources. 

Through its tightly integrated consortium, Gotham Foundry is redefining how infrastructure and commercialization efforts are coordinated. Gotham Foundry will leverage existing infrastructure at Harlem Biospace (for biofabrication and biocharacterization, technical consult, materials library, and training programs), ASRC (for advanced and complex materials characterization),  FIT (for fashion prototyping, production, and design), and Genspace (for workforce training).

The new hub is expected to generate $5.12 billion in economic output over the next three decades and will create career opportunities for New Yorkers, including through workforce training programs for entrepreneurs and students. It is supported by LifeSci NYC, the city’s $1 billion initiative to create 40,000 jobs over the next 10 to 15 years, and puts into action the city’s Green Economy Action Plan, a vision that integrates economic and talent development in this space. Gotham Foundry will leverage Columba’s established partnerships with its surrounding community to create opportunities for students and job seekers interested in learning skills for the green economy and to empower the next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Lead Photo Caption: From left to right: Kate Ascher, co-director of Gotham Foundry (GF) and professor of practice of urban development at Columbia; Rein Ulijn, co-director of GF and founding director of the CUNY ASRC Nanoscience Initiative; Helen Lu, director of GF and Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Theanne Schiros, co-director of GF and associate professor at FIT; and Neena Chakrabarti, board member at Genspace. 
Lead Photo Credit: Chris Taggart/Columbia Engineering

From flat sheets to complex structures

One major way that developing embryos build their organs is through furrowing — that is, they form pockets in tissues, which eventually become the sites of folds. "Just as a flat sheet of paper can be folded into a crane, a flat embryonic tissue can be folded into the precursor of an organ," said Andrew Countryman, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at Columbia and the study's first author.

Previous research has developed many tools for manipulating the proteins and other molecules that direct how cells behave. However, scientists lacked similar techniques for systematically controlling the mechanical forces that ultimately shape embryos. 

In the new study, Kasza, Countryman, and their colleagues experimented with the fruit fly, a common lab animal. "As developmental processes and machinery are highly conserved across animals, these findings in fruit flies provide insight into development in all animals, including humans," Countryman said.

Light-sensitive tools built with CRISPR

The researchers tinkered with proteins that cells use to generate mechanical forces, making these molecules responsive to light. By shining patterns of specific wavelengths of light on fruit fly embryos genetically modified to produce these proteins, they could in turn control patterns of forces during their development. 

The new study used the gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9 to add a light-sensitive module to genes that naturally exist in fruit flies. The resulting molecules are the first tools that let scientists use light to control an animal's own genes to direct mechanical forces in live embryos. They are also the first tools that enable scientists to employ light to control cell-generated forces in a tunable way, instead of just switching such forces on and off, Countryman said.

The researchers specifically modified proteins that help cells contract, one method by which tissues can generate furrows. The resulting tools, called endogenous OptoRhoGEFs, helped the scientists discover that the depth of a furrow depends on the amount of these contraction-linked proteins that get summoned to a cell's membrane. They also found that stiff layers of proteins within embryos could dramatically influence the ways in which tissues furrowed.

Implications for human health

"Similarly to fly embryos, human embryos extensively employ furrowing processes during development," Countryman said. "A failure of tissues to furrow properly is associated with common and devastating congenital disorders, such as spina bifida. Improved understanding of developmental processes will help identify and treat these conditions."

This new technique may one day help scientists better analyze tissue and organ development and disease, using light to fold basic sheets of cells into complex 3D structures in the lab instead of the more complex environments inside living animals, Countryman said.

In addition, "small, controllable, cell-based machines have promising use in medical contexts, where they can serve as biocompatible probes during medical procedures," he added. "They could also be used as small, aqueous, remotely pilotable vehicles to explore and survey new environments."

In the future, the researchers hope to use their new strategy to examine other ways in which tissues furrow, as well as tissue behaviors other than furrowing, such as bending, stretching, and flowing. "These basic modes of tissue deformation are used in different combinations and sequences to build a wide variety of tissues, organs, and body forms," Countryman said.

Lead Photo Caption: Re-engineering force-regulating proteins inside cells to control their behavior with specific wavelengths of light. Side view of a small group of optogenetically activated cells forming a furrow toward the inside of the embryo (top image, far left); Side view of a large group of optogenetically activated cells bending toward the outside of the embryo (bottom image, far left); Top view of a large group of optogenetically activated cells bending toward the outside of the embryo (center); Patterns of myosin–a contractile protein–associated with optogenetic activation of a large group of cells (far right). 

Lead Photo Credit: Andrew Countryman/Kasza lab

About The Study

Journal: Nature Communications

Title: Endogenous OptoRhoGEFs reveal biophysical principles of epithelial tissue furrowing

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-62483-6

Authors: Andrew D. Countryman, Caroline A. Doherty, R. Marisol Herrera-Perez, Karen E. Kasza.

Funding/Acknowledgements: The researchers thank Stas Shvartsman and Liz Gavis for their contributions to conceptualization of the endogenous optogenetic tools and for helpful discussions. They thank Bex Pendrak, Sameer Thukral, and Kasza Lab members for helpful discussions. Stocks obtained from the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (NIH P40OD018537) were used in this study. This work was performed in part at the Live Imaging and Bioenergetics Facility at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This work was supported by NIH Grant R35GM138380 to Karen E. Kasza and NIH Grant 1F31HD118793-01 to Andrew D. Countryman. Karen E. Kasza holds an NSF CAREER Award, Packard Fellowship, and Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics.

The authors declare no competing interests.