In May 2011, The Electrospinning Company became the first tenant of The European Space Agency's Business Incubation Centre at Harwell, a facility supported by Innovate UK.
The attraction for the company was that they could employ space-age materials for the biomedical research industry. So their process for making tiny but very precise holes, as part of their innovation, uses technology developed for miniature space thrusters.
Electrospinning uses an electrical charge to draw very fine fibres – typically on a micro or nano scale – from a liquid. As the jet of droplets dries in flight, it becomes stretched and thinned into uniform filaments by electrostatic repulsion.
The Electrospinning Company specialises in polymer scaffolds that support the growth of cells in 3D.
It sells a range of sterile tissue culture plates containing its Mimetix® polymer scaffold, intended for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and drug discovery research.
But the company first needed to prove its polymer scaffold technology was a reliable and commercially viable way to grow cells for research in a 3D environment.
CEO Ann Kramer arrived at the company at a crucial point in November 2011, armed with 20 years’ experience in commercial biotechnology.
“We knew there was a big potential demand for our product in drug discovery, but we had lots of unanswered questions. What’s the best fibre diameter and pore size for a scaffold? How thick should it be? Do we need to coat it with certain proteins? What should the sterilisation regime be? Most importantly, could we incorporate it into a multi-well plate format in a uniform, consistent way?”
£81,500 of Innovate UK Smart funding for a proof of concept study was a critical step in resolving these issues. Smart awards tackle the funding gap often experienced by many small and early-stage companies with game-changing ideas and high growth ambition.
“The funding made a huge difference. It meant we could work with expert sub-contractors – a cell biology group, a welding company, and a company that did the protein coatings – to refine our product.”
“For example, the laser welding technique developed by one of our partners, 4titude, allowed us to weld the polymer scaffold to a multi-well plate without using glues that could affect the growing cells. Now we’ve got a product and a prototype we can be really proud of and lots of learning we can incorporate into later products.”
But how does a 19th century technology fit into modern drug discovery?
“Currently there’s a high failure rate for drugs in clinical trial and companies are keen to find ways to identify potential successes (and failures) earlier in the laboratory. A lot of drug discovery research uses 2D cells grown on plastic in labs. It costs billions of dollars, but it's not actually that representative of what goes on in the body.“Growing cells in 3D enables scientists to conduct research in an environment that mimics what happens naturally and is more biologically relevant. This is where the polymer scaffolds come in.”
Mimetix was awarded a prize for best new innovative technology at a European Laboratory Robotics conference in 2013. German cell provider Medicyte has recently come on board as a distributor and is a partner in a €4.2m euro project to build a bio-artificial liver.
“Innovate UK support and grant funding made a big difference,” Ann emphasised. “It raised our profile for establishing commercial relationships. The support we had from monitoring officers was great and even the form-filling wasn’t too bad. It really helped us move our product out of the lab and into the marketplace.”