Innovative Houston lab works with 'ghost hearts' to study impact of regenerative medicine

stem cell magic

A Houston research team is studying the effects of regenerative medicine on hearts. Photo via TMC.org

Ask any high achiever and they’ll tell you — failure is the path to success.

As Camila Hochman-Mendez puts it, “I’m like Thomas Edison, right? I know a thousand ways of how not to create a lightbulb.” But she’s not really talking about electricity. Hochman-Mendez is director of Regenerative Medicine Research and the Biorepository Core at Texas Heart Institute.

Hochman-Mendez follows another pioneering woman in the role, Doris Taylor. The younger scientist took on the prime job when Taylor left in 2020. By then, Hochman-Mendez had been at The Texas Heart Institute for three years, moving from research scientist to assistant director in just four months.

Regenerative Medicine is every bit as exciting as it sounds. At Hochman-Mendez’s lab, her team creates ghost hearts — organs from which all cells are scrubbed, leaving collagen, fibronectin, and laminin in the shape of the formerly beating ticker. The goal is to use the decellularized organs as protein scaffolds that, once injected with stem cells, will once again contract and pump blood.

Hochman-Mendez cautions that we are still years away from that point, but her lab is working hard to get there.

“The ultimate goal is to develop functional hearts that can be used for transplant,” says Hochman-Mendez.

Those hearts would be made from the patient’s own cells, avoiding organ rejection, which the scientist says is essentially trading one disease for another. But she is realistic about that fact that there are many barriers to her success.

“It does come with a lot of technical challenges,” she says.

These challenges include the simple number of cells that billions, and potentially hundreds of billions of cardiomyocytes are needed to recreate a human heart. The necessary protocols, Hochman-Mendez explains, are extremely costly and labor intensive.

It also takes 60 days for the cells to reach a maturity at which they can function. The lab recently received a pair of grants targeted at creating bioreactors that can be reliable for at least those 60 days.

The third major issue facing the Regenerative Medicine lab is contamination.

“It needs to be very sterile,” says Hochman-Mendez. “It needs to be so clean that if you have one tiny bacteria there, you’re screwed.”

Fortunately, the scientist says that her favorite hobby is computer programming. She and a physician colleague have created a robotic arm that can help to prevent the contamination that often stemmed from humans manually injecting stem cells into the decellularized organs.

This not only works towards solving the contamination problem, it also allows the team to more accurately distribute the cells that they add, using an injection map. To that end, she is producing a three-dimensional model of a protein scaffold that will allow her team and other scientists in the field of regenerative medicine to understand how the cells really disperse when they inject them.

When will her lab produce working hearts?

“I try to be very conservative on timing,” she says.

She explains that it will take significant leaps in technology to make a heart mature to the level at which it’s usable for an adult body in 60 days.

“That’s magic and I don’t believe in magic,” she says, but adds that she hopes to have a prototype ready to be tested in five years.

Hochman-Mendez does this all with a small team of nine researchers, most of whom happen to be female.

“The best candidates are the ones that I select," she says. "The majority are females. I think it’s a mix of trying to be very unbiased, but I usually don’t even look at the name before looking at the CV to preselect the people that I interview.”

And together, Hochman-Mendez are making medical history, one success-spawning failure at a time.

Camila Hochman-Mendez is director of Regenerative Medicine Research and the Biorepository Core at Texas Heart Institute. Photo via texasheart.org

From Your Site Articles
Doris Taylor from the Texas Heart Institute has been named to the National Academy of Inventors.

Houston inventor receives national recognition for leading innovation

Leading lady

A Houston inventor is being recognized for her leadership within cardiovascular regenerative medicine. Doris A. Taylor from the Texas Heart Institute has been named among the National Academy of Inventors' 54 academic inventors to the spring 2019 class of NAI Senior Members.

Taylor's work involves finding alternatives for the current practices for organ transplants, including the whole organ decellularization/recellularization technologies she developed in 2008.

"Dr. Taylor's work has revolutionized the field by making it possible to bioengineer scaffolds that effectively mimic natural organs," says Dr. Darren Woodside, Texas Heart Institute's vice president for research, in a news release. "The three U.S. patents she currently holds have spun off 28 international patents, stimulating the worldwide tissue engineering industry. Her current research team is refining these technologies and developing others, potentially revolutionizing the transplantation industry and eliminating wait lists for life-saving transplantable organs."

NAI selects its honorees by identifying their impact on the welfare of society, the release reads, and have proven success with their patents, licensing, and commercialization.

NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists and administrators from its Member Institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society. They also have proven success in patents, licensing and commercialization.

An individual's nomination for the NAI Senior Member class by its supporting institution is a distinct honor and a significant way for the organization to publicly recognize its innovators on a national level.At their host institutions, Senior Members foster a spirit of innovation, while educating and mentoring the next generation of inventors.

The new class of NAI Senior Members includes representatives from 32 institutions. Texas A&M University has two researchers in the class — Robert Balog, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Balakrishna Haridas, a professor of practice in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and executive director for technology commercialization and entrepreneurship for the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.

This latest class of NAI Senior Members represents 32 research universities and government and non-profit research institutes. They are named inventors on over 860 issued U.S. patents. In February, two Houston inventors were named to the inaugural class of senior members.

"NAI Member Institutions support some of the most elite innovators on the horizon. With the NAI Senior Member award distinction, we are recognizing innovators that are rising stars in their fields," says Paul R. Sanberg, NAI president, in the release. "This new class is joining a prolific group of academic visionaries already defining tomorrow."

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Artemis II makes historic call to space station with help from Houston Mission Control

History in the making

Still aglow from their triumphant lunar flyby, the Artemis II astronauts made more history Tuesday, April 7: calling their friends aboard the International Space Station hundreds of thousands of miles away as they headed home from the moon.

It was the first moonship-to-spaceship radio linkup ever. NASA's Apollo crews had no off-the-planet company back in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time humanity set sail for deep space.

"We have been waiting for this like you can’t imagine,” Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman called out.

For Christina Koch on Artemis II and Jessica Meir aboard the space station, it marked a joyous space reunion despite being 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) apart. The two teamed up for the world's first all-female spacewalk in 2019 outside the orbiting lab.

Koch told her “astro-sister” that she'd hoped to meet up with her again in space “but I never thought it would be like this — it's amazing.”

“I'm so happy that we are back in space together,” Meir replied, “even if we are a few miles apart.”

Houston's Mission Control arranged the cosmic chitchat between the four lunar travelers and the space station's three NASA and one French residents.

Koch described being awe-struck by not just the beauty of Earth, “but how much blackness there was around it.”

“It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she told the space station crew. “The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized” when viewing the home planet from the moon.

By late Tuesday afternoon, the Artemis II astronauts had beamed back more than 50 gigabytes' worth of pictures and other data from the previous day's lunar rendezvous, which set a new distance record for humanity. The highlight: an Earthset photo reminiscent of Apollo 8's Earthrise shot from 1968.

"While they are inspirational and, I think, allow all of us to really feel a little bit of what they were feeling, there's also a lot of science hidden inside of those images," said Mission Control's lead lunar scientist Kelsey Young. “The conversations and the science lessons learned are just beginning."

During a debriefing with Young, the astronauts recounted how they spotted a cascade of pinpricks of light on the lunar surface from impacting cosmic debris. The flashes lasted mere milliseconds and coincided by chance with Monday evening's total solar eclipse.

Young said it was too soon to know whether the crew witnessed an actual meteor shower or more random, run-of-the-mill micrometeoroid hits. Either way, there were “audible screams of delight” in the science operations center, she said.

Koch described being awe-struck by not just the beauty of Earth, “but how much blackness there was around it.”

“It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she told the space station crew. “The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized” when viewing the home planet from the moon.

The first lunar explorers since Apollo 17 in 1972, Wiseman and his crew are aiming for a splashdown off the San Diego coast on Friday to wrap up the nearly 10-day test flight. The recovery ship USS John P. Murtha left port Tuesday for the target zone.

It sets the stage for next year's Artemis III, a lunar lander docking demo in orbit around Earth. Artemis IV will follow in 2028 with two astronauts attempting to land near the lunar south pole.

As for the Orion capsule’s pesky potty, Mission Control assured the astronauts that no maintenance was required Tuesday. The toilet has been on-and-off limits to the crew ever since last week’s launch, prompting them to rely on a backup bag-and-funnel system for urinating.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the crew following the lunar flyby Monday night: “We definitely have to fix some of the plumbing” ahead of the next Artemis mission. Engineers suspect a clogged filter in the overboard flushing system.

Aside from the toilet and other relatively minor matters, the mission has gone well, Isaacman noted at a news conference Tuesday, “but I'll breathe easier when we get through reentry and everybody's under chutes and in the water.”

AI-powered Houston startup helps restaurants boost customer loyalty

order up

It’s no secret that restaurant trends move fast and margins run thin. And with the proliferation of platforms like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Easy Cater, customer loyalty is fleeting.

The solution?

How about an AI-powered restaurant technology platform that helps restaurant brands cut back on third-party platforms in favor of driving direct discovery, conversion and loyalty?

Enter Saivory. Founded in 2025 by Stephen Klein, a software investor, and Fajita Pete’s restaurateur Hugh Guill, the Houston-based startup aims to help eateries better understand and activate guest behavior across digital channels as AI increasingly reshapes how consumers discover and engage with brands.

In less than a year, Saivory has partnered with Shipley Do-Nuts and Fajita Pete’s to bring AI-powered ordering to life.

“With Saivory, we were able to answer the question of, ‘what if the ordering process could be reduced to a single step, where customers simply tell us what they want and AI takes care of the rest?’” Klein tells InnovationMap.

The Houston-based startup made such an immediate impact that it was selected as a semi-finalist during Start-Up Alley at MURTEC, the restaurant industry’s leading technology conference, which took place last month in Las Vegas.

“Houston is a great hub for technology innovation, and we were proud to represent the city at MURTEC this year,” says Klein. “We didn’t win, but we were able to talk about some of the work that we have existing in the market for clients right now and a little bit about what we’re working on in the future.”

In the current restaurant technology ecosystem, the third-party aggregators own the customer attention that brings volume to restaurants, while also taking big commissions and having control over the end relationships with the customer.

That can often make it difficult for restaurants to grow loyalty and repeat business from customers. Saivory aims to level the playing field for restaurants, helping them stay more connected to their customers.

Take Saivory’s recent application with Shipley’s Do-Nuts, for example.

Saivory powered the donut giant’s AI-ordering and launched Shipley's website and mobile app to support its over 300 locations in Texas alone.

Shipley’s new AI-powered assistant helps users create personalized order recommendations based on individual or group preferences. And unlike standard chatbox features, the new assistant makes custom recommendations based on multiple customer factors, including budgetary habits, individual flavor preferences and order size. It can also be used for large catering orders.

“They're seeing more traffic to the site and they're seeing when customers use our AI-enabled flows,” Klein says. “And they're seeing higher basket sizes, bigger tickets, by about 25 percent.”

Klein says Saivory’s technology helps strengthen first-party digital relationships, reduce friction and cart abandonment, improve average order value, and delivers personalized, efficient experiences.

“It’s a win-win: the customer gets the right order quickly, while the restaurant gets a bigger margin,” he adds.

Additionally, the technology makes it easier for restaurants to share rewards, loyalty and discounts, ultimately growing more direct traffic and making restaurants less reliant on third-party delivery apps.

Next up for Saivory is adding new components to its platform to enhance the relationship between restaurant and customer, as well as technology around making it easier for restaurants to get found on Google.

“A lot of people are still searching for the best donuts near me,” Klein says. “Or what’s the best Mexican food near me? Customers will increasingly move to AI, where they’re going to ask where they should eat dinner and expect it to just order them dinner. They will eventually expect the technology to know how to do that. So that’s what we’re driving at.”

Houston leads U.S. in population growth for 2025, Census says

Boomtown

Imagine that the Houston metro area swallowed a city the size of Pearland in just one year. That’s essentially what happened from 2024 to 2025, with the Houston metro ranking first in the U.S. for population growth based on the number of people.

New estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show the 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. That’s just shy of Pearland’s roughly 133,000-resident tally.

To calculate population, the Census Bureau counts births, deaths, new residents, and moved-away residents.

Region’s population approaches 8 million

On July 1, 2025, the Houston metro’s population hovered slightly above 7.9 million, up 1.6 percent from the same time in 2024. In the very near future, the region’s population should break the eight million mark.

This follows massive growth in the past 20 years. From 2005 to 2025, the region’s population soared by 39 percent. By comparison, the growth rate from 2021 to 2025 sat at nine percent.

A forecast from the Texas Demographics Center indicates that under a middle-of-the-road scenario, the Houston metro’s population will reach nearly 8.5 million in mid-2030 and more than 9.5 million in mid-2040.

Dan Potter, director of Rice University’s Houston Population Research Center, attributes much of the region’s population surge to people moving to the area from outside the U.S. In Harris County, this means a combination of military personnel returning home, people living or working overseas coming back to the U.S., and immigrants relocating to the U.S., he tells CultureMap.

But Harris County fell short from 2024 to 2025 when it comes to people moving here from elsewhere in the U.S., according to Potter. Counties surrounding Harris County benefited from that trend, drawing new residents who preferred to settle in the suburbs.

“The incredible pull and attraction of the Houston area is its economy, its people, and its affordability, and the significant growth that was observed in 2024 and again in 2025 speaks to the magnetism of the region,” Potter says. “That pull to Houston is too strong to be turned off overnight.”

Cooling economy and immigration shifts slow down growth

Whether looking at urban or suburban places, population growth in the Houston area slowed in 2025 and appears to be slowing even more this year, Potter says.

“A cooling economy and changes to immigration policy are a one-two combination that could knock out the region’s population growth,” says Potter, citing the region’s addition of a less-than-expected 14,800 jobs in 2025 as an example.

Weaker population growth may not be felt evenly across the metro area, according to Potter.

A continuing influx of people from Houston to outlying counties such as Brazoria, Fort Bend, Liberty, Montgomery, and Waller could curb growth in Harris County, Potter said. Why? If the number of people arriving from other other countries flattens or even drops, then there could be “doughnut-style population growth for the next few years, where Harris County and Houston see declines while the suburban counties see an increase.”

Harris County represents 40 percent of region’s population lift

Houston-anchored Harris County accounted for almost 40 percent of the region’s population spike from 2024 to 2025. In one year, Harris County grew by 48,695 residents, or 1 percent, pushing its population past five million. That increase put Harris County in first place for numeric growth (rather than percentage growth) among all U.S. counties.

From 2020 to 2025, Harris County’s growth rate was 6.6 percent. It remains the country’s third largest county based on population, behind Southern California’s Los Angeles County and Illinois’ Chicago-anchored Cook County.

Harris County is on track to surpass Cook County in size in the near future. As of July 1, 2025, a nearly 150,000-resident gap separated population-losing Cook County and fast-growing Harris County.

The Texas Demographics Center predicts Harris County’s population will be 5.37 million in mid-2030 and just short of six million in mid-2040.

Suburban counties see significant population gains

Harris County isn’t the only county in the area that experienced a growth spurt from 2024 to 2025:

  • Waller County’s population climbed 5.69 percent, winding up at 69,858. Its growth rate ranked second among U.S. counties.
  • Liberty County’s population rose 4.4 percent to 121,364, putting its growth rate in eighth place among U.S. counties.
  • Montgomery County gained 30,011 residents, with its population landing at 781,194. That placed it at No. 4 among U.S. counties for numeric growth.
  • Fort Bend County picked up 24,163 residents, arriving at a total of 975,191 and positioning it at No. 8 among U.S. counties for numeric growth. Fort Bend County, the region’s second largest county based on population, is projected to break the one million-resident mark by July 2030, according to the Texas Demographics Center.

“Lower mortgage rates from 2009 to 2022 and the rise of remote work have made suburban housing more attractive, especially for families seeking affordability,” Pramod Sambidi, the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s assistant director of data analytics and research, said last year. “Additionally, suburban areas are seeing more multifamily developments than before the pandemic.”

---

This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

View All Listings