Engineering Human Tissues From Scratch With Frontier Bio’s Eric Bennett
Eric Bennett is the founder and CEO of Frontier Bio, a tissue engineering company developing lab-grown human tissues and organs for medical applications.
Eric Bennett is the founder and CEO of Frontier Bio, a tissue engineering company developing lab-grown human tissues and organs for medical applications.
What is Frontier Bio?
Frontier Bio is a tissue engineering company with the long-term goal of creating lab-grown human tissues and organs that can be implanted into patients. There’s massive demand for organs and other tissues. Over 20 people die every day waiting for organ transplants. In the near term, we’re using our tissues and tissue engineering services to replace animal studies, since human tissues are better surrogates for actual humans than animal models.
How did you come to found a lab-grown tissue company?
My background is in electrical and biomedical engineering. During my master’s, I was exposed to 3-D printing while working on brain-machine interfaces. After graduating, I wanted to work on something that sounded like science fiction but could plausibly become real. I thought creating living human tissue would be the ultimate application of 3-D printing.
3-D bioprinters were hundreds of thousands of dollars back then, so I founded a company called Aether where we made low-cost 3-D bioprinters to democratize access to bioprinting. Eventually that company wound down, and I started Frontier Bio to focus on building the tissues themselves. It’s more fun creating the actual tissues rather than the hardware that creates them.
A team at Mayo Clinic contacted me to build them a custom bioprinter because they wanted to create blood vessels for medical device testing. I had to start the company to make the sale because they could only buy from a company, not an individual. That was our first revenue.
How does Frontier Bio’s approach differ from current blood vessel grafts?
Our first clinical product will be a blood vessel graft made with the patient’s own cells. Current synthetic grafts have a failure rate of up to 65 percent within two years. Within two years, you’re likely to require another synthetic graft to replace it or need an intervention to restore blood flow. By implanting purely synthetic grafts, you’re introducing a foreign substance that can provoke adverse responses.
In our approach, we combine the patient’s own stem cells with a bioresorbable synthetic graft that completely dissolves in the body. The synthetic part is replaced by more cells and an extracellular matrix that the cells create. What remains is the patient’s own natural vessel.
What are the advantages of growing tissue inside the body versus in a bioreactor?
Having it grow within the body, using the body as the bioreactor, saves a lot of time and cost from growing it externally. We’ve grown tissues in bioreactors before, keeping them at body temperature and controlling nutrient, oxygen, and CO₂ levels. But it gets very expensive doing it that way.
Many patients can’t wait several months for a vessel to grow. They need it right away. So far our animal studies show good results with the approach of implanting right away and letting it mature inside the body.
What is the fundraising environment like in this field?
Fundraising in biotech has slowed significantly since our last raise in 2021. It’s taken some time, but we’ve been able to secure about 75 percent of our current round. Portfolia, a venture firm that mobilizes mostly women investors, led this seed round. We’ve also received several other investments from angels, funds, and repeat investors from our previous rounds. We’re also pursuing non-dilutive funding from various government programs for exciting applications of our technology.
How is Frontier Bio working to replace animal testing?
The status quo with animal testing is that 90 percent of drugs tested in animals end up failing during human clinical trials. It just doesn’t translate well. The FDA and NIH have announced a shift away from animal studies. They’re aware it’s possible to have better alternatives.
We’re creating neural tissue and recreating the blood-brain barrier on a microfluidic chip. Issues with the blood-brain barrier are associated with various neurological diseases and conditions like Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury. By modeling healthy or diseased vascularized brain tissue on a chip, we can mimic those conditions and test solutions as a service. This makes it possible to replace hundreds of animal tests with our tissue chips, saving a large number of animals, but also generating more human-relevant data.
What’s the long-term vision for Frontier Bio?
In the future, the organ transplant waitlist will be eliminated. If a patient needs an organ, instead of waiting years to find a matched donor, we get started on creating one right away. Within a few months it’s ready from their own cells and implanted. Even if somebody gets a donated organ now, they’re on immunosuppressive drugs which have side effects. You need your immune system to fight off infection and cancer. Organs made from your own cells is the way to go.
We’re starting with blood vessels because they’re the foundation for virtually all tissues. We’re creating not just the large blood vessels like arteries, but also the microvasculature within tissue. That opens the door to organs like kidney, pancreas, liver, and other organs.
How do you define deep tech?
It’s any technology that sounds like science fiction and requires a lot of hard work and left-field thinking to make it become reality.
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