Hope all is going well. Here I am late on Thursday evening wondering where the last two weeks went. It always makes it a challenge to write this blog when I am feeling a little tired (more so than usual), but I will give it a shot. We are going to keep this blog a little shorter than usual. As the title of this week’s blog indicates, it has been a good few weeks. It has been busy both personal and professional fronts. One of the best things that happened since we last connected was that Tina and I celebrated the wedding of our daughter Tarryn this past weekend. Most of the time I am busy mostly on the professional front so this was a nice addition. It was such a beautiful beach ceremony with a small intimate group of their friends. Hard not for me to think of the little girl that I feel like we just brought home from the hospital. Needless to say, I was very emotional seeing her in her wedding dress for the first time. We could not have been happier for her and her new husband Nate. Tina and I wish them a lifetime of happiness!
During the last two weeks, we continued to get more of our Bio-Spun™ materials out the door, either to a potential future collaborator to evaluate our technology or to an existing customer. The final uses of these materials are pretty diverse, from use as a scaffold for growing and expanding the body’s cells to use in a cosmetic product or to housing small groups of cells called organoids. An organoid is basically a small cluster of cells that form into a tiny portion of a human organ like a pancreas or liver. During this time, we were also beginning to receive some data from testing being conducted by these outside groups. There is nothing better than getting data back, especially when it is positive, that reinforces what we are seeing from data we are generating from our internal research. With the amount of Bio-Spun™ materials we have been sending out, it does make it challenging to make sure that we are following up with each group. I tend to spend a decent portion of my week just tracking people down. That being said, it is still worth doing. Hopefully, in the near future, we can share some of this data with you.
This week, we also had some productive conversations with partners that we are currently working with to develop specific applications using our Bio-Spun™ technology. The results of these studies from these two companies were very promising, so much so, that we discussed taking both programs to the next level. This is extremely gratifying! Sometimes these studies can take months to complete. Additionally, priorities at these companies can change so even though the data is positive, they can decide to not move forward. To have two of our leading partners commit to going to the next step, which actually occurred on the same day, was outstanding. It could have been a bummer if they both did not have good news (not sure why I set it up like that but based on the outcome, it could not have been better). Both of these technologies, which are very different, would bring an innovative approach to their respective fields. We are excited to be part of this process.
We continue to be busy on the business development front. We prepared some marketing materials for our Bio-Spun™ scaffold business for the 2021 American Society for Cellular and Computational Toxicology (ASCCT) Meeting that will begin on October 12th. As mentioned in a previous blog, Dr. Patrick Hayden will be presenting his Alveolar data using our Bio-Spun™ scaffolds. We hope you can virtually attend this meeting. We have also been pursuing various methods to expand our network in order to bring our technology to different groups. The goal is to specifically target areas where our technology can have a significant impact. We continue to work towards executing our business plan. I believe BioSurfaces is at an inflection point and with all of the potential opportunities, the company is ready to head to the next level. We cannot wait to see the results of our hard work.
See you back here on October 15th.
Matt