Week 10 – Is Now Finally the Time for Bio-Spun®?

Hope you all are doing well.  Tina and I would first like to start out this month’s blog by congratulating Jamie from our team and her husband Hayden on the arrival of their new son.  We consider it a privilege to see many of the different events that our team experiences.  While most things we get to witness are joyous such as the arrival of a new baby, getting married, purchasing a first home, or learning a new skill that they then can apply within the company, some are not as joyous such as getting in an accident after leaving work or losing a close friend or relative.  Being a small business, we get to witness many different facets of our team members that you would likely not get to closely witness at a bigger company.  We all work so closely together that you cannot help but feel like a close-knit community.

I continue to be so encouraged about our technology, even though we, like other businesses, have been facing significant headwinds from tariffs and high fuel costs to high healthcare costs and interest rates.  These costs directly affect the different areas of our business, from shipping products overseas to purchasing supplies.  Our costs are increased due to this and when you are trying to launch or expand your business, it puts a lot of stress on the company.  These added costs force the company to make tough choices.  I try to compartmentalize these issues because when I see what our technology is being considered for, I believe that there’s a there there.  It is also the scientist in me that makes me think about the science first.  I always joke (well, it’s more truth than a joke) that if I was looking to get rich, I would have chosen a different profession.   It is the passion for the technology that gets me up in the morning.  This is the first year in our 23-year history where I believe this could be the time for Bio-Spun^®.    

As I’ve mentioned, we are pushing Bio-Spun^® along on two key fronts: as a scaffold to grow tissue for use as life science benchtop tools and as a stand-alone or component for medical devices.  For life science benchtop tools, we continue to hear more about the need for better benchtop tools for drug screening and disease modeling.  The current process to develop new drugs is flawed.  It relies on using animals to test a drug candidate prior to trials in people.  Over 95% of the drug candidates that make it out of animal trials fail when tested in people.  There has been a strong global push to develop New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) that make more human-relevant benchtop models that will reduce or eliminate animal use. 

We always knew, based on our medical device studies, that our Bio-Spun^® materials encouraged cellular ingrowth/healing when implanted.  Having this knowledge, we began investigating how our scaffold behaved with cells in benchtop studies.  This was before NAMs was even a mainstream concept.  The data we were observing after implantation served as the foundation for this benchtop push on our end.  We began to receive requests from customers to make our Bio-Spun^® scaffolds for their specific applications.  These groups began sharing their data with us, showing that the scaffolds were effective in growing various types of tissue.  We also started evaluating it in internal studies, which correlated with what we were seeing from our customers.  We started to believe that Bio-Spun^® could be a game-changer for these products.  It also offered options based on the properties that the customer was looking for.  We then began exploring how to sell these products (we never sold a product before this), expand our product offerings, provide accessory items for these products and look to find potential partners that might help make different iterations of these products like kits and tissues.  We have been selling to global pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies.  Many of these areas are still in progress but to think where we started and where we’ve come from, it is pretty exciting.  The drive to NAMs is picking up steam, with the market projected to be over $29.4 billion by 2030.  We believe that the opportunity for our Bio-Spun^® technology is now. 

BioSurfaces was originally established to create materials that would be better than those being used in existing medical devices.  As a scientist, I was frustrated by people accepting that the existing materials were “good enough.”  This viewpoint was contradicted by the complications that continue to occur using these materials on devices.  We worked hard to develop our proprietary electrospun technology which we applied to create different medical devices that we were interested in such as vascular grafts, perianal fistula plugs, cell therapy delivery chambers, etc.  Some partners/customers have asked us to help them develop a device in a specific area, which is a fun challenge to undertake.  It is science so it is not always successful.  That being said, we are constantly learning.  This year, we are seeing more companies reaching out to ask us to apply our technology to their application.  I think there is a sense of realization that to create next-generation devices, there is a need for different approaches.  I love the challenge to create new applications for our technology.

We’ve waited a long time to feel this way.  It is a scary feeling.  That being said, I believe the timing is right.  It is now or never. 

Matt