Oct. 17—For years, Advanced Solutions Life Sciences has worked to develop a robotic arm to make living tissue.
Meet BioAssemblyBot 500 — or BAB500 for short.
In listening to customer needs, the company developed its latest BioAssemblyBot model to be contained inside a sterile, biosafety cabinet.
BAB500 is among five products in the running for the New Hampshire Tech Alliance’s Product of the Year on Oct. 28. Advanced Solutions, based in Kentucky, operates a subsidiary in Manchester’s Millyard in partnership with the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute founded by Manchester inventor Dean Kamen.
Previously, the six-axis robotic arm would need to be located inside a clean lab, which is not always available and can be costly to build or secure. Now, the biosafety cabinet ensures a sterile environment.
“That makes it immediately useful for building tissues to go into patients,” said Jay Hoying, chief scientist.
The product now creates tissues used in research and tested successfully in animals. Tissue for human beings is the main goal, but is unknown when it will be done on a mass scale.
The BAB500 can be used to make tissue using 3-D bioprinting to understand drugs, liver toxicity, fixing heart arrhythmia and more. Bioprinting can produce structures capable of sustaining life, the company says.
“We’ve made human liver tissue with it. We’ve made bone,” Hoying said. “We have customers who are working on a tubular replacement for a trachea.”
The product is being shipped to a company in France.
“They are using it to build a person a piece of skin to use to treat burns,” Hoying said.
Most of the tissue building is being done by hand, he said. The equipment being built by Advanced Solutions helps the tissue to be manufactured.
“If I build one by hand as needed, yes I help a patient, and to that patient it is great,” he said. “But if I want to help a thousand patients this way, we need to be able to start to build those tissues at a manufacturing level.”
The machine took about 75,000 engineering and scientific research and development hours to develop. The BAB500 also comes with design software and other functions to help customers advance bioprinting.
The manufactured tissues can be used to create models for new drug discovery and research without having to deal with shipping and storing living tissues. One example is a disease model of tumors for studies. Customers who have bought the product are making cartilage, skeletal muscles and even heart tissues.
The BAB500 is designed to take the product from research and development into manufacturing.
“Customers were asking us for this solution,” Hoying said. “They said, ‘Hey, we love what you’re doing. We love the way the platform works, and we’d like to have it in a clean environment.'”
The upgrades will revolutionize tissue manufacturing and curative health care, the company says.
In terms of curative health care, Hoying gave the example of arrhythmia where a damaged part of the heart is managed with drugs.
“What if you could replace the piece of the heart that’s not working right or the whole heart and take away the disease component?” he said. “Now we’ve cured the patient instead of managing the patient.”
Different “hands” can attach to the robotic arms to allow for bioprinting, pipetting and moving material around inside the closed cabinet.
“We like to say it is bioprinting-plus,” Hoying said. “It can do bioprinting and a whole lot more.”
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