Systemic Bio, a 3D Systems company, announced the opening of its new headquarters for hydrogel scaffold manufacturing and organ-on-a-chip R&D to facilitate its mission to accelerate drug discovery and development. This state-of-the-art facility contains a cleanroom for bioprinted hydrogel production and is located in the TMC Innovation Factory Labs on the Texas Medical Center Campus in Houston. From this location, Systemic Bio’s engineers and scientists will continue the development and production of the company’s proprietary h-VIOS (human vascularized integrated organ systems) organ-on-a-chip platform.
h-VIOS is a versatile organ-on-a-chip platform that can recapitulate several organ and disease functions. Composed of vascularized hydrogel scaffolds, the h-VIOS platform enables the survival and function of human cells, both healthy and diseased, as well as the delivery of drugs to these cells in a more physiological manner. The establishment and further validation of these systems has the potential to significantly reduce both the high costs and extended times required for pharmaceutical companies to bring new drugs to market. The new center of excellence for scaffold manufacturing will enable sterile and quality-controlled production of h-VIOS chips and plates to be used by Systemic Bio’s pharmaceutical partners in drug testing. To oversee manufacturing operations, Systemic Bio hired Jeremy Carter as its Vice President of Operations. Jeremy has more than ten years of experience with GMP and FDA-regulated biopharmaceutical production at leading biotech companies such as Grail and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
“The opening of this facility is a fantastic milestone in Systemic Bio’s journey to accelerate drug discovery and development and a leap forward for the field of bioprinting,” said Taci Pereira, CEO, Systemic Bio. “With cutting-edge Print-to-Perfusion bioprinting technology from 3D Systems, our new cleanroom, and an exceptional team of scientists and engineers, we can now manufacture patterned sterile hydrogel scaffolds for commercial use with unprecedented precision, quality, and scalability. This marks a pivotal shift for bioprinting – going from experimental research to full-scale production. The h-VIOS platform is just the beginning of what we can unlock in the biotech industry with this new capability, and we look forward to continuing to partner with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to pursue these new opportunities.”
Systemic Bio is working to establish multi-year partnerships with pharmaceutical companies that could lead to the discovery of promising new drugs using the h-VIOS platform. Beyond providing organ-on-a-chip test samples and services, Systemic Bio is also now partnering with biotechnology companies interested in leveraging its hydrogel manufacturing capability to produce scaffolds for their applications of interest. The company is also currently recruiting for several open positions.
