ASLS CEO Michael Golway featured in an interview with Dr. Craig Maxwell discussing the BioAssemblyBot platform and the path to printed organs. Read more.

Scientists led by Dr. Rohan Shirwaiker at North Carolina State University have developed a way of arranging cells in 3D bioprinted gels. With this method, the team aims to improve the fidelity of artificial tissues compared to their biological equivalents. The view is that these tissues could then be used to treat common injuries. Rohan Shirwaiker, NC State associate professor and corresponding author of a paper discussing the results, explains, “We’ve reached the point where we are able to create medical products, such as knee implants, by printing living cells. But one challenge has been organizing the cells that are being printed, so that the engineered tissue more closely mimics natural tissues.” Read more.

A team of researchers led by Dr. Vahid Serpooshan, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering and Pediatrics at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University School of Medicine, have used BioAssemblyBot to create a patch with a regenerative protein to treat the infarcted myocardium (cardiac muscle, a part of the heart that gets damaged during a heart attack). Read more on 3Dprint.com

MANCHESTER—Long waiting lists are a drag, but when they’re for an organ transplant, they can also be lethal. Over 120,000 Americans are waiting for a donated organ, and the list gets longer all the time. Twenty-two of them die each day, and many of those lucky enough to make it perish from routine illnesses because their immune systems have been hobbled by drugs to prevent the rejection of the transplanted organ. Read Full Story Here

3D.FAB, a French additive manufacturing platform, is developing a “living bandage” using 3D bioprinting and direct additive manufacturing. According to the platform’s project “STRESSKIN,” such technologies can be positioned in this field of regenerative and personalized medicine to address this issue. Using a BioAssemblyBot, a 6-axis robotic arm for biofabrication, this material is deposited onto the patient’s skin, forming an autograft that will create new skin in approximately two weeks. This approach is said to overcome other 3D printed skin solutions which have been proven to be too fragile to be sutured. Read more.

“Generalized Biomanufacturing Platform for Dynamic Vascularized Tissues,” proposes the development of a manufacturing workflow solution for the building of vascularized tissue that is suitable for use in clinical applications and non-clinical commercial spaces. The technical approach of this project involves the development and integration of task-specific controls within existing equipment, in combination with new manufacturing tool sets and microfluidic capabilities, to create a vascularized tissue. Renowned for their 6-axis robotic bioprinter/biofabricator, also known as the BioAssemblyBot® (BAB), ASLS has partnered with GE HLS to combine their respective technologies to advance the capabilities of the BAB to include multiple automated workflow capabilities, elevating tissue fabrication from a laboratory phenomena into a manufacturing process. Jay Hoying, Partner and Chief Scientist at ASLS and Project Lead, states “The motivation for the project really speaks to the broader mission that we had at ASLS for tissue manufacturing, which ARMI helped to crystallize. The Bio-Assembly® platform that we currently have, while it does tissue printing, was envisioned to be an automated tissue engineering platform.” The printer features a six-axis robotic arm, which allows for precise printing of complex 3D tissue components, with additional degrees of freedom for movement on both planar and non-planar surfaces. It is ideal for printing cell systems and 3D assays, experimental tissue models and microenvironments, organ models, microfluidic platforms, implant systems, and many other structures. Read more on ARMIusa.org

Dimension Inx, a company that develops biomaterials for 3D printing, has signed a distribution agreement with Advanced Solutions Life Sciences (ASLS), a company specializing in biofabrication technologies. Through the partnership, ASLS will now offer Dimension Inx’s bioprinting materials to clients around the globe. Read more

Join CEO, inventor and engineer, Michael Golway, as he offers insight into the agile manufacturing and biofabrication processes available with the BioAssemblyBot® technology platform. The patented 6-axis robot arm enables a unique capability to not only 3D print both additive and contour structures, but also provide automated and controlled workflow for assembly and material movement tasks. The 6-axis robot arm even extends the manufacturing workflow capability outside the BioAssemblyBot® workstation as it intelligently interfaces directly with other value added equipment critical to biofabrication process such as incubation, imaging, and bioreactors. Read more.

While researchers see 3D printed organs in a clinical setting to be something like twenty years out most regular consumers see it a something that is bound to happen in a few years. In the middle of this exciting development sits the Advanced Solutions Life Sciences which makes bioprinters, bioprinting software and bioinks and is a part of the larger firm, Kentucky based Advanced Solutions Inc.(ASI). We interviewed Michael Golway the CEO of ASI and the company’s scientific advisor James Hoying to find out what they’re doing in bioprinting. Read complete story here.

The Center for Engineering Complex Tissues (CECT) acquired a new BioAssemblyBot (BAB) 3D printer – an advanced bioprinter designed for tissue fabrication and 3D printing – from Advanced Solutions Life Sciences (ASLS). The printer features a six-axis robotic arm, which allows for precise printing of complex 3D tissue components, with additional degrees of freedom for movement on both planar and non-planar surfaces. It is ideal for printing cell systems and 3D assays, experimental tissue models and microenvironments, organ models, microfluidic platforms, implant systems, and many other structures. Read more on CECT.

BioAssemblyBot and Angiomics featured in GE Healthcare Life Sciences' Science Director Paul Goodwin’s article on the future of 3D bioprinting in precision health. “We have been working with Jay Hoying at Advanced Solutions Life Sciences (ASLS) who stumbled across a way to create these more native-like vasculatures. Years ago, Jay was working as a young investigator studying microvasculature. For his experimental model, he was using abdominal fat from mice. By luck he discovered that torn up small pieces of microvasculature will spontaneously grow new vessels (angiogenesis) and that these new vessels will self-assemble into a vascular bed that recreates the semi-chaotic native structure. When he placed these beds with different tissues (heart, liver, kidney, neural) they would spontaneously create vascular beds similar to what you would find on those tissues in the body” “We are now working with ASLS to use cellular imaging instruments to create a fully automated agile work station for printing, verifying (physical, chemical, and biological), and maturing vascularised tissues” Read more in the EPM Magazine.

Our Chief Scientist Dr. James (Jay) Hoying featured on a panel with Derek Morris from United Therapeutics to discuss how we can dig deeper into biology and technology to push this field forward. Read more on the Ink Link.

The Kentucky-based company specializes in supporting 3D bioprinting teams, development labs, and research facilities. Advanced Solutions produces bioprinters, which can print out cell systems and arrays, experimental tissue models, organ models, microfluidic platforms or implant systems. The company has over 50 employees and also offers a 3D CAD software called TSIM, with which medical professionals can create visualizations based on patient data from medical images and print out 3D models with the help of its robotic arm. Read more on the Medical Futurist.

As 3D printing evolves, new ways of printing and new materials will be discovered but I never imagined 3d printing having the capabilities to print human tissue or an organ. Although there is a lot of research and testing that still needs to be done, this field is expanding rapidly. Michael Golway and his team at Advanced Solutions have created a 6-axis bio 3d printer (BioAssemblyBot). It’s companies like Advanced Solutions that are accelerating our technology in amazing ways. Clearly, the Advanced Solutions team are going to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Listen now on the Innovation Freak podcast.

BioAssemblyBot power user Dr. Christophe Marquette discusses insights regarding his work building vascularized skin tissue. See story on LABIOTECH.eu

We need companies that are willing to take a risk and people who are willing to be the example of what it takes to build a new industry. (Advanced Solutions CEO) Michael Golway is the type of guy we need here to lead as an example to the rest of the people to make this a success. Read complete story here.

Advanced Solutions Life Sciences (ASLS) is a leader in tissue fabrication and 3D bioprinting, and, like all bioprinting companies, has the goal of ultimately 3D printing transplantable human organs. The company is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, but recently expanded, opening a new facility in Manchester, New Hampshire. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at the new facility, which will serve as a laboratory and biofabrication facility. Employees of ASLS were in attendance, as were several dignitaries, members of the Advanced Regenerative Medical Institute (ARMI), on whose campus the new facility is located, and other community members. The ceremony was led by Dean Kamen, Founder of ARMI. See story on 3Dprint.com

A company that has the goal of mass producing human organs and tissue opened its doors Wednesday in Manchester. See More Here

James (Jay) Hoying, Ph.D., is Partner and Chief Scientist of Advanced Solutions Life Sciences (ASLS), a company pioneering solutions in tissue fabrication and biomanufacturing. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biology and Molecular Biology from Case Western Reserve University and his Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology from the University of Arizona. See Story

MANCHESTER – Michael Golway is so bullish on Dean Kamen and someday manufacturing human organs that he is moving a dozen staffers to Manchester at year’s end. The president and CEO of a Kentucky company, Advanced Solutions, Golway said he can foresee housing as many as 150 workers here within three years and perhaps 10 times that number years down the road – reaping potentially billions of dollars of yearly revenue. “I think it has the opportunity for a small company to play a role in something that could be very big and profound and impactful – not only for our country but for a lot of people around the world,” Golway said by phone from Kentucky last week. Golway is talking about the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, which is ramping up in the Millyard. Kamen spearheaded Manchester securing ARMI and about $294 million in government and private investment committed. ARMI hopes to make the manufacturing of human body parts commercially viable. Golway hopes his company’s invention of the world’s first 3-D human tissue printer that operates on a six-axis robot can be incorporated into ARMI’s work. A subsidiary, Advanced Solutions Life Sciences, plans to set up “a research lab where we’re using 3-D printer technology to grow blood vessels outside the body,” he said. “Certainly, the vision that Dean has to develop the way forward for mass producing the production of human organs, we think vascularization is going to be a key part of it,” Golway said. “We see a real fertile research ground where folks that will be involved with ARMI and BioFabUSA can potentially use our technology. The more we get to use it in different applications, the better we can get. “It’s a learning and improvement opportunity,” he said. “We also have designed and built and we currently sell the first 3-D human tissue printer that uses a six-axis robot.” During a recent speech in Concord, Kamen noted Advanced Solutions’ commitment to moving a dozen workers to “help the Millyard become the beginning of an ecosystem.” Company officials were in Manchester for ARMI’s kickoff in July. “My sense is they were beyond excited about collaborating with ARMI and really were impressed with what they were seeing in Manchester and with the Millyard and struck them as an environment where they could be successful,” said Mike Skelton, president and CEO of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, said. Golway showed that excitement during a phone interview. “I was definitely a little star-struck,” he said of meeting Kamen, whose inventions include the Segway Human Transporter and the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics. “He’s a powerful visionary and somebody that I’ve come to admire and trust.” Golway thinks now is the time to move science to a higher level. “Just taking out all the barriers to discovery” and “bring subject experts together to accelerate discovery and move the science forward,” he said. “That’s very appealing to me as an entrepreneur and business owner.” Using human fat cells, “we have a technique where we can extract the fat and 3-D print the microvessels” and grow them outside the body, he said. Their efforts have shown promise in testing on rats. “We can do implants into animals,” he said. “We have not gone to human trial at this point.” He hopes that will start in the next three to five years. An engineer by training, Golway sees a human heart as a collection of cell assemblies just as a car has thousands of subassemblies. “Our approach is to take it in small segments,” he said, and “bring the subassemblies into more complex structures.” Think of stitching afghan squares together. “It’s not like the printer prints the heart all at once,” he said. “We bring it together to make more complex structures all the way up to a full organ.” Original Source: https://www.unionleader.com/article/20171119/NEWS02/171119264/-1/mobile?template=mobileart

Over a year after the initial proposal, an assemblage of the most innovative bioengineering researchers, industry leaders and dignitaries materialized at the newly launched Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute on July 28. Inventor Dean Kamen introduced the crowd of over 300 attendees in the Manchester Millyard to the launch of the 12th Manufacturing USA Institute, supported with $80 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Defense and over $200 million in public-private investment from medical research institutions, universities and other industry players. The federal grant is intended to spur a regenerative medicine industry to treat injured service members, and the general population through the commercial marketplace. In one row alone sat Governor Chris Sununu, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, the CEO of Rockwell Automation and a DOD official. “We do build rockets and electronic radars and the like, but much of the challenges we face in the department are in areas that are either adjacent to the battlefield or not on the battlefield itself and that’s why this institute is so important,” said Jerry McGinn, principal deputy director for the DOD’s office of manufacturing and industrial base policy. “We’re focused on advanced manufacturing and its critical function to transform the discovery and invention of promising technologies into real products.” “I think this is the beginning of an industry,” Kamen, founder of DEKA Research and Development Corp., told NH Business Review after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “I think we have more major companies, universities, medical schools, prestigious government institutions here than I’ve ever seen in one room at one time and I think they understand how big this opportunity is.” “This project has the potential to be transformative [for the city],” said Michael Skelton, president and CEO of the Greater Manchester Chamber. “All of the positive trends in the last 10 years — this has been throwing logs on the fire.” “Of all the other manufacturing institutes and initiatives going on, I think this is probably one of the more exciting ones,” said Jeremy Hitchcock, former CEO of internet performance management firm Dyn. Hitchcock noted the vast representation of university partners, including Hitchcock’s alma mater Worcester Polytechnic Institute, demonstrated this is where cutting-edge science is happening. “And you have research up at Dartmouth, you have [the] Boston life sciences [industry], and so I think this is going to be a place where people are going to congregate,” said Hitchcock, standing in the networking area behind the auditorium-style seating. Biofabrication Down the hallway, as part of Gov. Chris Sununu’s tour of ARMI, Michael Golway, president and CEO of Louisville, Ky.-based Advanced Solutions, presented the BioAssemblyBot, or as he called her, BAB. “We’re bringing forward 60 years of innovation,” said Golway. “The first industrial robot was invented in 1954. It’s only in 2017 that it’s gotten small enough, capable enough [so] we can put it in a box and teach it to print human tissues.” With patient-specific data, the company can build a 3-D model of a tissue using a computer-aided design program, select the biomaterials and let the printer automate the rest. Dr. James Hoying and Michael Golway of Kentucky-based Advanced Solutions explain how tissue can be built using BioAssemblyBot. “At [BAB’s] wrist we can actually connect different tool types and now she brings a workflow capability to building organs,” said Golway. “From the wrist down, we have the ability to engineer and design whatever tool we need, either to print or to pick and place or to assemble.” However, it’s unlikely that the system would build an organ from scratch and print it all in one go, said Dr. James Hoying. Instead, like a car engine, each part of an organ would be printed separately and assembled later. To build these subassemblies, Advanced Solutions will leverage the potential of the platform that allows them to swap out different tool types, said Dr. Hoying. From fat cells, Dr. Hoying has extracted a vascular network, meaning while tissue is being printed, microvessels will connect and form just as they do in the human body. “We think the biology is smarter than we are. It knows what to do,” said Dr. Hoying. “Our task is not to place individual vessels in specific places, but to create an environment where all the blood vessels can rearrange and do what it needs to do to meet the needs of the tissue, to the point where we know we can take our vessels from fat, and turn those fat vessels, in the right environment, into brain vessels, for example, or kidney vessels or heart vessels.” “Our strategy is to use our platform and the vast expertise the ARMI initiative really provides us is to define those environments and let the biology do its thing. It will always do better than we will,” said Dr. Hoying. Operating in New Hampshire Sununu, who met over 100 out-of-state businesses in his first 100 days in office to convince them to move to New Hampshire, enthusiastically stepped forward to greet Dr. Hoying, after the announcement was made to the tour group that Advanced Solutions was considering moving its life sciences lab to the area. “I think the best thing that the state can do is provide an atmosphere that makes it easy for businesses to come in and partner — because that’s what this is: a public-private partnership,” Sununu told NH Business Review. “To get [Dr. Hoying] to move from Kentucky is a very tough thing, so it underscores the huge potential here and just how much excitement we have for the vision,” said Golway. Sununu spoke with NH Business Review about the opportunity ARMI presents for the state. “I think the best thing that the state can do is provide an atmosphere that makes it easy for businesses to come in and partner — because that’s what this is: a public-private partnership,” said Sununu. “Whether it’s breaking down business taxes, throwing out regulations, meeting with industries one-on-one [or] making sure they understand their access to government and access to elected officials that can open up pathways for them is there. This is a state where most people have my cell phone number, and that’s an incredibly powerful thing in the process of driving businesses.” Earlier in the day, Kamen had reflected on the competitiveness of the ARMI contract, with larger states offering million-dollar commitments if awarded the contract. During the process, Kamen asked Senators Shaheen and Ayotte and then-Gov. Maggie Hassan to write a letter of support to the DOD. “We were very excited to do that,” Sen. Hassan told NH Business Review. They wrote the DOD, “saying that even though we won’t put up a lot of cash like the big states, we had something different and more special, which was a spirit of entrepreneurship and getting things done here in New Hampshire and efficiently with Dean Kamen.” As governor, Sen. Maggie Hassan, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and then-Senator Kelly Ayotte wrote the DOD, “saying that even though we won’t put up a lot of cash like the big states, we had something different and more special, which was a spirit of entrepreneurship and getting things done here in New Hampshire and efficiently with Dean Kamen,” Hassan told NH Business Review. “I absolutely believe we have state support,” said Kamen. “Now one of the issues is, this is such a huge opportunity and this is such a relatively small and frugal state, we have to come up with innovative ways to make sure the state can keep up with the scale of this opportunity, but I really do believe we will be able to keep up with this opportunity and we will not lose it.” Workforce development Essential to the growth of ARMI is a skilled workforce, and that’s a struggle across each sectors right now. At ARMI’s launch, Sununu argued in favor of long-term solutions, including promoting robotics to children, like Kamen’s robotics competition FIRST, and visiting with university systems and public schools to create workforce pathways. To prove to the DOD that there was an available workforce to scale the regenerative medicine industry, Kamen formed a partnership with the University of New Hampshire and hired UNH provost and vice president of academic affairs, Nancy Targett, to administer ARMI education and workforce development. During the legislative session, the University System of New Hampshire initially requested $30 million from the capital budget and then lowered its request to $10 million, for renovating its teaching lab space in Durham, to reinvigorate its biotechnology program. Within ARMI, UNH-Manchester, led by Dean Mike Decelle, has a carved-out space for labs and classrooms where ARMI faculty will interact with students. The governor did not include any capital budget funds or additional operational funding to the university system in his proposed 2018-2019 budget. Dr. Richard McFarland, then former director of research with the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, has been examining this question of how the FDA would regulate regenerative organs for the last 17 years. Now with ARMI, McFarland will be a guest lecturer at UNH Manchester. “I took that $10 million and created the first-of-its-kind scholarship program for New Hampshire high school students,” said Sununu. “That’s 21st century school choice, allowing kids and parents to have the pathways and the choices within public schools to create the best decision and pathway for their career. It’s just, kind of taking that old school thinking of plowing money into one institution to the new age, the 21st century way of thinking, where we have to broaden peoples’ opportunities and choices in terms of finding that pathway.” Mary Ann Pacelli, manager of workforce development at the Manufacturing Extension Partnership that supports Manufacturing USA institutes, argued the main workforce issue in the manufacturing industry is teaching students about job possibilities in the industry and bringing technology in the classroom up to scale. That will require introducing faculty to work environments so they’re familiar with the types of jobs their students could fill. “[Employers] want to have experienced people right out of school,” says Kathleen Green, workforce director at the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, a Manufacturing USA institute in Delaware. “They want to have people who can come in, hit the ground running with new technologies, understand the technologies and understand what it’s like to work in — not only the workplace — but also a regulated environment. Because this is highly regulated and it needs to be.” Liisa Rajala can be reached at lrajala@nhbr.com. Original Source: https://www.nhbr.com/August-4-2017/ARMIs-launch-draws-leading-researchers-and-politicians/

Read the story here: https://3dprint.com/178939/bioprinting-news-dog-robot/

Kentucky-based software company Advanced Solutions has developed what it calls the world’s first 3D human tissue printer that operates on a six axis robot. Called the BioAssemblyBot, the machine is the second generation of 3D printers focused on producing biomedical materials intended to revolutionizing healthcare. The goal is to 3D print human organs, Advanced Solutions president and CEO Michael Golway told CNBC on Friday. The BioAssemblyBot uses a touch screen and a laser sensor to tell the robot arm and nozzle where to move and what to do next, operating on software called the Tissue Structure Informational Modeling. TISM essentially allows users to design and visualize the tissue structure before it’s replicated by the BioAssemblyBot. “The tools that we’ve invented, like the BioAssemblyBot, are enabling our scientists and our customers to advance the biology in ways that have never been possible before, so that’s very exciting,” said Golway. The most challenging aspect of the process is bioink, the material used in 3D bioprinting. Bioink must satisfy mechanical needs of the printing process while containing the elements needed to make the tissue come to life. Golway admits his firm needs to “fail faster” in order to see accelerated progress, and acknowledged significant effort, discovery and investment are still needed before an actual organ can be printed for human use, he said. “We can print liver cells in a structure the size of a U.S. quarter and combine it with our vascularization technology in a 3D structure to get results that begin to mimic a functioning liver.” Advanced Solutions and its customers are also using the technology to create mimics for lungs, hearts, kidneys, pancreases, bones and even human skin. “We’re using raw material from the patient to actually create 3D structures outside the body. We happen to think the vascularization piece, i.e. the ability to get blood flow to the tissues, will be a really critical part and a foundational step to the long term advancements that we’ll see in 3D printed organs.” While bioprinting could solve the problem of who gets to the top of the transplant list, printing human organs creates legal and ethical problems. “We believe in the next five years, you’ll start to see movement from the research side to the clinical side, where we’re starting to develop functional solutions for the patient,” said Golway. “I can only expect that there will be a lot of debate and discussion around the ethics, and I have great confidence that once we go to the clinical side, it will be a safe application for patients.” Original Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/advanced-solutions-develops-first-3d-human-tissue-printer-that-operates-on-six-axis-robot.html

Advanced Solutions says it is moving ever closer to developing software to print 3D human organs. The US-based company’s BioAssembly Bot is built to produce biomedical materials and to develop vascular structures outside of the human body. It uses Tissue Structure Information Modeling, software that gives operators the ability to design tissue structure so that it can be replicated by the BioAssembly Bot. The ultimate aim is to produce functioning human organs, says Advanced Solutions’ President and CEO Michael Golway. “That is certainly our goal. We have quite a bit to do in that area but certainly the tools we’ve invented, like the BioAssemblyBot, are enabling our scientists to advance the biology in ways that have never been possible before and that’s very exciting,” he told CNBC. “We can print liver cells in a structure the size of a U.S. quarter and combine it with our vascularization technology in a 3D structure to get results that begin to mimic a functioning liver. “We have a model where we have to fail faster. Our objective, certainly from the engineering side, is to bring the market tools that allow the researchers, the biologists and the scientists to fail faster so they can move the biology forward.” Golway believes the fruits of his company’s research could be seen in around five years, though he admits there are ethical issues to consider. “We believe in the next five years, you’ll start to see movement from the research side to the clinical side, where we’re starting to develop functional solutions for the patient,” he added. “I can only expect that there will be a lot of debate and discussion around the ethics, and I have great confidence that once we go to the clinical side, it will be a safe application for patients.” Original Source: Healthcare Global

View the talk here: https://www.pscp.tv/NASDAQ/1vAGRbmBzeaGl