Prof Katherine Elvira is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, Canada. The Elvira Lab specialises in developing microfluidic technologies to build designer artificial cells and tissues. New drugs take 10-15 years to develop, cost ~2.6 billion USD each, and many fail because of the difficulty of predicting how they will interact with human cells. Prof. Elvira's group builds designer artificial cells on a chip the size of a postage stamp that mimic live cells. This is important because they can be used to test new drugs early in the drug discovery process and see whether they will work. The group's artificial cells are designed to give insights into, for example, how cancer drugs behave in cells.