Week 9 – Expanding the Bio-Spun® Brand – Driving New Applications

Hope you all are doing well.  I cannot believe that summer is already beginning to wind down.  You really start to notice it when we see darkness setting in earlier each day.  It was always more evident when our kids were younger, as we started to get them ready to head back to school.  For the past 23 years, late July through August has seen a slowdown in business as people head out on vacation.  Several countries in Europe, for example, have several weeks off in the summer.  For some reason, this summer has been consistently busy for us.  It could be that we have two different lines of business that are each active whereas in the past, it would be one area only that would have some business while the other was slow.  For the record, I am not complaining.  It will be interesting to see what the fall season will look like.  It seems to me that our Bio-Spun^® materials, whether it be for IVRT or for medical device applications, are starting to gain some traction and recognition.  Not sure why it has taken so long, but like my comment before, I am not complaining.                  

Sometimes, it takes a while for the world around you to catch up to what you are doing and why it could work.  When we first started the company, I wrote a government grant that focused on locally delivering antimicrobial agents to prevent infection at the implant site when a device was surgically implanted.  If you are not familiar with submitting a grant, you prepare a document that talks about what the goal of the study is, why you think it will work (your hypothesis), similar studies that have been conducted in the past (background), any data you generated (preliminary studies) and what you are proposing to accomplish (experimental methods).  Independent reviewers that are experts in the field then review the grant and give it a score if they think it might be worth further discussion (priority score) or triage it (not considered worth pursuing).  During this review, they give the lead (principal) investigator input on various areas which you can use if you choose to resubmit the grant.  I thought this idea was a good one and worth pursuing.  Well, needless to say, they didn’t feel the same way.  They completely destroyed the grant, mentioning all of the reasons why it would fail.  I knew that the concept was valid, but the reviewers were not getting it.  A few years later, I resubmitted essentially the same grant but with some very minor tweaks.  The concept was still the same.  The reviewers thought the concept was good and they ended up funding the grant.  I truly believe that our proposal was slightly ahead of where science was at that time and we just needed to be patient, which isn’t always easy when it’s your livelihood on the line.  To some extent, I believe that is where Bio-Spun^® is now and that the world is catching up to it.  Not that electrospinning has not been around for a while.  Rather the world is now beginning to accept it more and is moving toward it.  It could not come soon enough.

Last week’s blog talked about reflecting on some of the techniques I had developed early in my career and how they are still applicable today.  We have also begun to focus on new applications for our Bio-Spun^® technology, some significant improvements and some that we think could be next-generation applications for both IVRT and medical device components.  In both business areas, we think we could really expand.  I will even share a little data that we have not released yet so you are getting a sneak peek.  Our IVRT business continues to gain traction from different groups, ranging from pharmaceutical companies to cosmetic companies.  We have developed a full-thickness skin model that is being used by many different groups.  We are moving onto a new airway (bronchial) model and customers are looking at different applications such as intestine, retina, rheumatoid arthritis and blood/brain barrier.  Some partners are also developing a new cancer model for skin and a liver model.  Even for the full-thickness skin model, some customers are looking for larger tissue that they can evaluate their specific microneedling devices.  Our team was able to take time to expand our current model to make 6-well insert-sized skin for this specific application.  The close-up data (histology) image shows this new option.  We are also exploring opportunities to produce kits and tissue for customers with potential partners.  We also are working on new scaffold options that will allow the customer to tailor the tissue they want to produce.  This customization could revolutionize how different tissues could be made, potentially providing more human-relevant data.        

For medical devices, we have been receiving more interest in using electrospinning as a possible substitute for or as a complementary aspect for their specific device application.  The ability to deliver drugs or active agents directly from the device versus having to deliver the drug throughout the patient’s body has become an attractive potential for this technology.  Does this sound familiar?  Both large and small medical device companies are exploring different ways to use our Bio-Spun^® materials for cardiac, vascular and dermal substitutes just to name a few areas.  These applications take advantage of many years of research and development.  We believe even more innovation is possible to drive better healing while preventing complications from occurring. 

The best is yet to come.  Several factors that tend to limit technology development is funding, time and vision.  We have always seemed to have limited funding, so this has required us to be creative.  I truly believe that if we had more funding we could rapidly expand options for our customers and advance the field.  We continue to plan to bring this vision to a reality.

Matt