Company type | Public |
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Industry | |
Founded | January 27, 2016 in Gothenburg, Sweden |
Founders |
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Headquarters | , Sweden |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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Revenue | 1.26 billion kr (2021) |
−237 million kr (2021) | |
−229 million kr (2021) | |
Total assets | 9.75 billion kr (2021) |
Total equity | 6.77 billion kr (2021) |
Owners |
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Number of employees | 1,150+ (2021) |
Website | bico |
Footnotes /references [1] |
Bico Group (previously Cellink) is a bioconvergence startup that designs and supplies technologies and services to enhance biology research. It focuses on commercializing technologies for life science research as well as bioprinting, and its products often combine capabilities in artificial intelligence, robotics, multiomics, and diagnostics. [2]
Bico Group (then Cellink) began by producing bio-inks and bioprinters for culturing different cell types to enable applications like patient-derived implants. [3] Bico Group was the first company to provide a standardized bio-ink product for sale over the internet. [4]
The company has ongoing collaborations with organizations including AstraZeneca, MedImmune, MIT and Takara Bio, and its bioprinters are used for research at Harvard University, Merck, Novartis, the U.S. Army, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson and more. [2]
Bico Group was founded as Cellink in 2016 by Erik Gatenholm, the company's chief executive, Héctor Martinez, the company's CTO and Gusten Danielsson, the company's CFO. [4] They developed and sold the world's first universally compatible bio-ink to simplify bioprinting for academics and pharmaceutical companies who were, at that time, mixing their own biomaterial in-house. [4] [5] The company released its first bioprinter to test the market in 2015, and continued designing additional bio-inks to support more specialized applications in bioprinting. [5]
Ten months after it was founded, Cellink was listed publicly on the Nasdaq exchange First North. [4] At its IPO, shares were oversubscribed by 1070 percent. [5]
As the company's technology makes it possible to print tissues such as skin, liver, cornea, and cartilage, its technology also allows printing fully functional cancer tumors which can be used to develop new cancer treatment. [6] [7] In 2018, Cellink received a $2.5 million grant from the EU to fund its TumorPrint project. [8]
In 2017, the company was described as "a world leader in bioprinting". It established a United States headquarters in Boston the same year. [4]
In January 2018, Cellink announced a collaboration with Ctibiotech to boost 3D bioprinting technology for cancer research. [9]
The company's revenue totaled $4.88 million in 2018. [10] As of February 2019, its products are used by more than 600 labs in more than 50 countries. [11]
In August 2021, Cellink underwent a corporate transformation and changed name to BICO, while keeping the Cellink name for their bioprinting business. [12]
Bico Group acquired German biotechnology company Cytena in August 2019 for a purchase price of $33.8 million. [13] [14]
Bico Group acquired Scienion, a global precision dispensing company, in 2020 for $94.8 million, along with its subsidiary Cellenion. [15]
Bico Group transitioned to a bioconvergence company in 2020, expanding its focus from bioprinting to broader life sciences technology and industrial solutions.[ buzzword ] [2] The company develops and markets products that enable researchers to culture cells in 3D, perform high-throughput drug screening, and print human tissues and organs for use in medical, pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications.
In May 2021, Bico Group acquired German 3D microfabrication company Nanoscribe for $70.6 million as well as the US-based contract research company Visikol for $7.5 million. [16]
In December 2021, Bico Group acquired the San Diego life-science automaton company Biosero for $165 million. [17] [18]
In August 2023, co-founder Erik Gatenholm stepped down from his position as CEO with Maria Forss appointed as the new CEO. [19]
The bio-ink produced by the company contains cellulose and alginate, locally sourced from trees in Sweden and seaweed from the Norwegian Sea, respectively. [4] Cellink's bio-ink technology was developed at Chalmers University. [4]
The Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited is a Japanese multinational pharmaceutical company. It is the third largest pharmaceutical company in Asia, behind Sinopharm and Shanghai Pharmaceuticals, and one of the top 20 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world by revenue. The company has over 49,578 employees worldwide and achieved US$19.299 billion in revenue during the 2018 fiscal year. The company is focused on oncology, rare diseases, neuroscience, gastroenterology, plasma-derived therapies and vaccines. Its headquarters is located in Chuo-ku, Osaka, and it has an office in Nihonbashi, Chuo, Tokyo. In January 2012, Fortune Magazine ranked the Takeda Oncology Company as one of the 100 best companies to work for in the United States. As of 2015, Christophe Weber was appointed as the CEO and president of Takeda.
Organ printing utilizes techniques similar to conventional 3D printing where a computer model is fed into a printer that lays down successive layers of plastics or wax until a 3D object is produced. In the case of organ printing, the material being used by the printer is a biocompatible plastic. The biocompatible plastic forms a scaffold that acts as the skeleton for the organ that is being printed. As the plastic is being laid down, it is also seeded with human cells from the patient's organ that is being printed for. After printing, the organ is transferred to an incubation chamber to give the cells time to grow. After a sufficient amount of time, the organ is implanted into the patient.
Jennifer A. Lewis is an American materials scientist and engineer, best known for her research on colloidal assembly of ceramics and 3D printing of functional, structural, and biological materials.
Anthony Atala is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He is the W.H. Boyce professor of urology, the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. His work focuses on the science of regenerative medicine: "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells".
Ali Khademhosseini is the CEO of the Terasaki Institute, non-profit research organization in Los Angeles, and Omeat Inc., a cultivated-meat startup. Before taking his current CEO roles, he spent one year at Amazon Inc. Prior to that he was the Levi Knight chair and professor at the University of California-Los Angeles where he held a multi-departmental professorship in Bioengineering, Radiology, Chemical, and Biomolecular Engineering as well as the Director of Center for Minimally Invasive Therapeutics (C-MIT). From 2005 to 2017, he was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
The Methuselah Foundation is an American-based global non-profit organization based in Springfield, Virginia, with a declared mission to "make 90 the new 50 by 2030" by supporting tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. The organization was originally incorporated by David Gobel in 2001 as the Performance Prize Society, a name inspired by the British governments Longitude Act, which offered monetary rewards for anyone who could devise a portable, practical solution for determining a ship's longitude.
David Gobel is an American philanthropist, entrepreneur, inventor, and futurist. He is co-founder and CEO of the Methuselah Foundation, CEO of the Methuselah Fund, and one of the first to publicly advance the idea of longevity escape velocity, even before this term was formulated.
Three dimensional (3D) bioprinting is the utilization of 3D printing–like techniques to combine cells, growth factors, bio-inks, and biomaterials to fabricate functional structures that were traditionally used for tissue engineering applications but in recent times have seen increased interest in other applications such as biosensing, and environmental remediation. Generally, 3D bioprinting utilizes a layer-by-layer method to deposit materials known as bio-inks to create tissue-like structures that are later used in various medical and tissue engineering fields. 3D bioprinting covers a broad range of bioprinting techniques and biomaterials. Currently, bioprinting can be used to print tissue and organ models to help research drugs and potential treatments. Nonetheless, translation of bioprinted living cellular constructs into clinical application is met with several issues due to the complexity and cell number necessary to create functional organs. However, innovations span from bioprinting of extracellular matrix to mixing cells with hydrogels deposited layer by layer to produce the desired tissue. In addition, 3D bioprinting has begun to incorporate the printing of scaffolds which can be used to regenerate joints and ligaments. Apart from these, 3D bioprinting has recently been used in environmental remediation applications, including the fabrication of functional biofilms that host functional microorganisms that can facilitate pollutant removal.
3D cell culturing by Magnetic LevitationMethod (MLM) is the application of growing 3D tissue by inducing cells treated with magnetic nanoparticle assemblies in spatially varying magnetic fields, using neodymium magnetic drivers and promoting cell-to-cell interactions by levitating the cells up to the air/liquid interface of a standard petri dish. The magnetic nanoparticle assemblies consist of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, gold nanoparticles, and the polymer polylysine. 3D cell culturing is scalable, with the capability of culturing as few as 500 cells up to millions of cells, or from a single dish to high-throughput low volume systems. Once magnetized cultures are generated, they can also be used as the building block material, or the "ink" for the magnetic 3D bioprinting process.
Magnetic 3D bioprinting is a methodology that employs biocompatible magnetic nanoparticles to print cells into 3D structures or 3D cell cultures. In this process, cells are tagged with magnetic nanoparticles that are used to render them magnetic. Once magnetic, these cells can be rapidly printed into specific 3D patterns using external magnetic forces that mimic tissue structure and function.
Organovo is an early-stage medical laboratory and research company which designs and develops functional, three dimensional human tissue for medical research and therapeutic applications. Organovo was established in 2007 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. The company uses its internally developed NovoGen MMX Bioprinter for 3D bioprinting.
Ethics of bioprinting is a sub-field of ethics concerning bioprinting. Some of the ethical issues surrounding bioprinting include equal access to treatment, clinical safety complications, and the enhancement of human body.
Jemma Redmond was an Irish biotechnology pioneer and innovator. She was a co-founder of 3D bio-printing firm Ourobotics, developers of the first-ever ten-material bio-printer. Redmond designed a way of keeping living cells alive while printed using 3D printers, making her a leading figure in Irish science and technology.
Bio-inks are materials used to produce engineered/artificial live tissue using 3D printing. These inks are mostly composed of the cells that are being used, but are often used in tandem with additional materials that envelope the cells. The combination of cells and usually biopolymer gels are defined as a bio-ink. They must meet certain characteristics, including such as rheological, mechanical, biofunctional and biocompatibility properties, among others. Using bio-inks provides a high reproducibility and precise control over the fabricated constructs in an automated manner. These inks are considered as one of the most advanced tools for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM).
In recent years, 3D printing has developed significantly and can now perform crucial roles in many applications, with the most common applications being manufacturing, medicine, architecture, custom art and design, and can vary from fully functional to purely aesthetic applications.
Erik Gatenholm is a Swedish-American entrepreneur. He is credited with marketing the world's first universal bio-ink.
Aleph Farms is a cellular agriculture company active in the food technology space. It was co-founded in 2017 by the Israeli food-tech incubator "The Kitchen Hub" of Strauss Group Ltd., and Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel.
Microgravity bioprinting is the utilization of 3D bioprinting techniques under microgravity conditions to fabricate highly complex, functional tissue and organ structures. The zero gravity environment circumvents some of the current limitations of bioprinting on Earth including magnetic field disruption and biostructure retention during the printing process. Microgravity bioprinting is one of the initial steps to advancing in space exploration and colonization while furthering the possibilities of regenerative medicine.
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is a cross-disciplinary research institute at Harvard University focused on bridging the gap between academia and industry by drawing inspiration from nature's design principles to solve challenges in health care and the environment. It is focused on the field of biologically inspired engineering to be distinct from bioengineering and biomedical engineering. The institute also has a focus on applications, intellectual property generation, and commercialization.
Bioprinting drug delivery is a method of using the three-dimensional printing of biomaterials through an additive manufacturing technique to develop drug delivery vehicles that are biocompatible tissue-specific hydrogels or implantable devices. 3D bioprinting uses printed cells and biological molecules to manufacture tissues, organs, or biological materials in a scaffold-free manner that mimics living human tissue to provide localized and tissue-specific drug delivery, allowing for targeted disease treatments with scalable and complex geometry.