Week 5 – Hitting the Half-Way Point

Hope all is going well.  I would like to open this month’s blog by welcoming Elexa McFadden (Roger Williams College) and Adrianna Niles (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) to our team for the summer.  We also welcome high school students Alexis Guadiz (Westborough High School) and Christen Varughese (Ashland High School) to our team as well.  Tina and I really enjoy this time of year.  In the blink of an eye, BioSurfaces became even busier (and we are busy), with our intern room now completely full.  This has only happened a hand full of times, in terms of the room being completely full, so you can feel the new energy radiating throughout the hallways.  Many companies that I speak with do not want to take on interns due to the time commitment.  They feel that it is a waste of time.  Tina and I never had the opportunity to have an internship and strongly believe that giving back to the next generation of scientists is important.  It makes us so proud when we look back and see the success that so many of our former interns are having.  We like to think that they’ve taken a little of what they learned at BioSurfaces into their full-time careers, even if it is not in the lab.  After all, being a small business, they do not just learn about benchtop science.  They learn about how technology can help people, how a small business runs, being able to multi-task and working as a team to accomplish an objective.  This group of young ladies is already making their mark on the company and we look forward to watching them grow from an experience standpoint throughout the summer.

We have been fortunate to onboard interns throughout most of our 22 years in business.  There have been years where either business has been financially restricted or we are extremely busy that we cannot provide what I would consider a good internship experience in terms of having the time to really train someone.  As I tell every intern, this internship is not only about learning or expanding the “tools in your toolbox”, it is also about learning what you like and do not like so that when you are looking for your full-time job, it can help you sort through different opportunities.  I have never had an issue with an intern saying I liked what I learned but this is not what I want to do in my full-time job.  You might think that I should be insulted but I do not feel this way at all.  During this internship, we get a good set of hands to help out, they get to learn new skills and being in Massachusetts, we are fortunate to have this internship reimbursed by the state so the only thing we are potentially sacrificing is time.  This internship has also allowed us to review different potential candidates for full-time hires.  We currently have 3 full-time team members that were former interns and have been with us for several years already.  They continue to leave their fingerprints on all we do.  This internship, I would argue, has been important to the success of the company.

I cannot believe that we are already through the halfway point of 2025.  As a company, we have so many things we are working on that you can lose sight in terms of progress.  The past week, I was preparing a 6-month update for our investors (to any of our investors reading this blog, you will be receiving this in the upcoming week).  I’ve heard from several investors that they hardly receive any updates from other companies that they’ve invested in.  As I’ve mentioned in past blogs, we are so appreciative of our investors and their belief in our technology so we look to provide them with regular update as they have put their faith in us and we do not take that lightly.  As I was writing the update for the first 6 months of 2025, I realized the tremendous ground we’ve made since the end of last year.  We are continuing to grow all three of our business lines.  While there have been some opportunities that have faded, others have come in to more than fill the void.  We are looking forward to seeing all of the hard work that we put into place in terms of executing our distributor and co-marketing agreements, our direct outreach campaigns, new co-development programs and other early- stage discussions (hopefully more on these in upcoming blogs) will allow us to reap the fruits of these endeavors.  We do not know what will happen, but we can say we have put a lot of work into setting the company up for success.  We still have a few important areas to execute, including expanding our manufacturing capabilities, to meet the opportunities.      Now we have to execute.

We are excited to announce that we learned last week that the two abstracts we submitted to the 2025 Surfaces in Biomaterials Foundation’s BioInterface Symposium and Conference  (https://www.surfaces.org/BioInterface2025/) related to the overall Bio-Spun™ material platform and our Bio-Spun™ Cell Chamber were accepted for oral and poster presentation, respectively.  Congratulations to our team for all of their hard work and dedication to develop all of these applications over the years.  This meeting allows us to showcase our Bio-Spun™ materials in medical devices.  Our business team also plans on being an exhibitor at the conference to give companies a close-up view of our technology.  More information will be forthcoming over the next few months, but figured we would give you the good news first.

Hope our US readers have a safe and happy 4^th of July!

Matt

Photo Credits: https://www.anl.gov/sites/www/files/edu_science_undergrad_lab_internship_2.jpg