Week 11 – A Tribute to a Dedicated Person

Hope you all are doing well.  Hard to believe that October is already almost in the books.  The days go by so fast that you can lose track of them quickly.  I feel that the days tend to go by faster the older I am getting.  I guess when I was younger, with kids and all the other things that life was throwing at me, I didn’t have time to notice how fast time truly moves.  I went from being the new guy in the lab to now being a “seasoned” veteran, with all the battle scars that come with the territory.  That being said, I still wouldn’t trade my job with anyone.  I enjoy coming into work and learning new things, even when it can get frustrating when you can’t figure something out.  I have also learned things outside of science that I never thought I would need to know.

This leads me to the topic of this week’s blog.  As I’ve relayed to you, I would always be as authentic as possible.  We have appreciated all of your support since we’ve started chronicling our journey.  It is really what keeps us going when things are not going so well.  We’ve always strived to give you an inside look at BioSurfaces so you can truly understand what being a small biotech business owner is like.  For this month’s blog, we have decided to share with you some news that not even our own team (minus Cameron since he runs our social media) knows.  Tina and I felt like this is a great way to make an announcement that we have been thinking about for a long time.  And before you move on, it is not about us leaving the business or us selling the company for a gazillion dollars, although the latter one wouldn’t be too bad.  Just wanted to get that out of your thoughts.

As you know, we are always so proud of each member of our team.  We cannot say it enough.  We really have the best group of people.  They are not just excellent scientists and engineers.  They are also great people.  The dedication we are about to make is to one member of our team who has made it his life’s work to develop more human-relevant tissue models that can be used for drug screening and disease modeling, something that he has been doing for over 27 years.  We believe that his work should not go unnoticed.  Many of us go into this field not to get accolades, but to try to make a difference in people’s lives, even if it is a small.  It is this passion that drives us.  It is our feeling that one of our team members exemplifies this drive and deserves to have his work recognized.

Dr. Patrick (Pat) Hayden joined BioSurfaces in 2019.  Pat, who has his PhD. in Chemical Biology, has primarily focused his career as a tissue engineer which I believe is right on-point.  I was fortunate enough to meet Pat a few years prior to him joining us here.  In 2016, we were approached by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create electrospun scaffolds for a benchtop retinal model they were developing.  It was during this time that we met Pat as our two companies were discussing working together to produce models with the NIH.  In addition to this collaboration, we were looking for someone to test our Bio-Spun^® scaffold and Pat, being ever the curious scientist, jumped right in.  BioSurfaces’ main technology is centered around our electrospun materials and growing tissue was not and is not our objective.  We were looking to understand how our scaffold would behave with different cells to make tissue.  We had already seen positive results using Bio-Spun^® materials as an implant material in the body so we had a good feeling that these positive results would translate to making tissue at the benchtop.

When the opportunity for Pat to join us became available (I always tell people that Pat was the best free agent acquisition we’ve made), we discussed the possibility of building a new full thickness skin model that would be human-relevant and remove all animal products.  We also wanted to make the procedure to make this model available to our customers so that they could make it in their own labs, what we call an open-source protocol.  As I mentioned, we are not interested in making the tissue, but rather producing a model that our Bio-Spun^® scaffold plays a central role in.  Pat went right to work.  This model took time to develop as Pat wanted to create a reproducible, long-lasting model.  It is one of the reasons I selected the picture I did.  Pat likely is not going to be happy with that picture so I will explain.  Pat has spent many hours in that tissue culture hood to develop this model and now a few other new models.  His perseverance and determination to make this work is something I can relate to.  Pat is the epitome of what a scientist should be, working through problems, maintaining optimistic, rethinking the strategy and bringing his results to the scientific community.  Pat has written and received grants to develop this technology, recently publishing his findings which are being downloaded around the world.

To celebrate all of Pat’s accomplishments in this field, we are naming our full thickness skin model as the “Bio-Spun^® Hayden FT Skin Model.”  This name will be added to the protocol that we provide to our customers to recognize all of Pat’s hard work and grit to bring this model to reality.  He is truly deserving of this honor!  We encourage you to reach out to Pat on LinkedIn to congratulate him.  We look forward to many more years of working with him.        

Matt