BiomACS
Biomaterial Advanced Cell Screening
We aim to improve medical implants and devices:
BiomACS BV offers a screening technology platform that addresses one of the biggest challenges of the €200B medical implant industry: i.e. , the secondary complications of the implants in patients, including excessive scar tissue formation, secondary cataract, infection, or insufficient adhesion to the surrounding tissue. The company’s unique proprietary technology consists of special surfaces prepared from the test material that allows generating and screening 10,000 experimental conditions within a single cell culture experiment. It provides implant-developing companies with tailored advice on the optimum combination of surface properties of their implant at a very early stage of implant design/optimization and thereby drastically improves the chance of developing a final implant with vastly reduced secondary complications.
— BiomACS Technology
BiomACS is a unique proprietary screening technology platform to perform thousands of experiments in a single run in a semi-automated fashion, using relevant tissue cells and cell combinations on a given material surface. It identifies optimum material properties for reducing cell-driven adverse effects of materials inside the body. The tested physical material properties are surface structure, surface wettability, and stiffness, each covering a broad range of values and in thousands of different combinations, created reproducibly in a fraction of the time of current approaches. With this cost-effective approach, BiomACS provides an urgently needed solution for avoiding adverse effects of medical implants. To date, this approach was not possible without the BiomACS technology. The technology has been developed at the University of Groningen and the University Medical Center Groningen within the department of Biomedical Engineering .
— Medical need for improvement
Medical implants are an estimated €200 billion market worldwide. However, medical implant technology and patients suffer from the secondary medical complications of implants in the body. The major adverse effects of implants are scar tissue formation, infection, and inflammation and the accompanying economic and social burden. When any of these effects become substantial, the patient may be hospitalized, need surgery, and/or revalidation.
Against this background, medical implant companies aim to develop their implants to limit secondary complications. Introducing new non-FDA materials would be a solution; however, it takes decades and much capital. Instead, optimizing current clinically relevant materials offers a faster and cheaper strategy. BiomACS plays a crucial role in these developments by offering the BiomACS high-throughput screening technology.