Born in 1984 in Coahuila, Mexico, Dr. Grissel Trujillo-de Santiago is the founder and CSO of Forma Foods, a food biotechnology startup, and the leading scientist behind “chaotic printing” technology, an innovation that enables scientists to 3D print living tissues.
Trujillo’s work with chaotic printing began in the field of regenerative medicine. After earning her doctorate in biotechnology from the Monterrey Institute of Technology, Trujillo began her career researching the use of bio-micro and nanotechnology for tissue engineering. By 2017, she was co-directing the Álvarez-Trujillo Laboratory with her husband and research collaborator, Mario Moisés Álvarez. Trujillo’s journey to Forma Foods started in this lab, when she and Álvarez began a bioprinting research project to develop chaotic printing, a technique designed to fabricate complex biological tissues using living cells.
While conventional 3D printing primarily controls the external shape of the object, chaotic printing allows the operator to also control the internal microstructure of the object. The core technique exploits a phenomenon called chaotic advection, in which fluids move through a carefully designed system and undergo extremely complicated stretching and folding. Although the resulting flow looks chaotic, its behavior can be mathematically predicted and controlled. Trujillo has compared the phenomenon to pouring cream into coffee: the fluid forms intricate structures as it moves and folds. Her team’s innovation is essentially to harness and control this type of behavior during printing. The process can therefore transform a relatively simple material into extremely fine, ordered multilayer structures, duplicating the natural organization of biological tissues.
In 2022, Trujillo founded Forma Foods, a startup dedicated to developing 3D-printing technology capable of producing plant-based meat substitutes. By replicating the intricate fiber architecture of animal tissue, the technology aims to produce plant-based alternatives that more closely mimic the appearance, texture, and mouthfeel of conventional meat, addressing one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: the sensory experience gap between real and substitute meat.
In 2024, Forma Foods was selected as a finalist for the Entrepreneurship World Cup. In the same year, Forma Foods also won the International House: Series A+ Edition Pitch Competition at South by Southwest. In the meantime, Trujillo has been a prolific researcher, with more than 80 publications and thousands of citations. She holds three Mexican patents for innovations related to chaotic printing technology and has several more patents currently under prosecution. In 2019, Trujillo received the L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in Natural Sciences. Perhaps most personally meaningful, she has also been recognized as a Distinguished Citizen of Matamoros, Coahuila, her hometown.
Today, Trujillo continues to develop chaotic printing techniques and is exploring its biomedical applications in organ donation and drug testing. In the last two years, Trujillo and her colleagues have reported advances in multimaterial chaotic printing, which aims to construct tissues in which different materials perform different functions, an important step toward producing complex tissues such as skeletal muscle. The broader goal is manufacturing an environment in which living cells survive and behave like tissue. With her research, Trujillo hopes to not only advance the field of biomedical engineering but also strengthen Mexico’s position as a center for cutting-edge bioengineering research and attract scientists from around the world.
