New collaboration will help OP startup 3D bioprint, scale its next-gen biotech solution

A Kansas biotech startup’s new manufacturing partner will boost efforts to automate and mass produce Ronawk’s headline-grabbing Bio-Block technology — a platform that has already accelerated medical advancements in tissue therapy.

Ronawk Bio-Block technology; photo courtesy of Ronawk

“Collaboration is critical for turning research advances into commercial therapies rapidly. The complexity and diversity of modalities is so big that nobody can do it alone,” said Heather Decker, co-founder and CTO at Overland Park-based Ronawk.

The company on Tuesday announced B9Creations as its global additive manufacturing partner, leaning on the Rapid City, South Dakota partner to help Ronawk scale its solution to the masses.

“The future of next-generation therapies is not only about discovering them but manufacturing them in a better way,” Decker said. “We needed a company who was responsive, collaborative, and had deep systems expertise in how their hardware, software and our proprietary bio-ink worked together to deliver a solution at scale.”

“Leveraging B9Creations’ technology and consultative services, we produced in six hours what we used to produce in a month,” she continued.

Heather Decker, Ronawk, works in Ronawk’s Kansas lab; photo courtesy of Ronawk

Ronawk’s revolutionary platform not only empowers researchers to explore heretofore unseen intricacies of stem cell behavior, it also accelerates the pace of drug discovery and the development of tailored therapeutic strategies by offering insights into cellular responses and treatment effects with unprecedented consistency and precision, according to the company.

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The technology partnership between Ronawk and B9Creations already is revolutionizing personalized medicine with root cause analysis of specific cancers at top-tier healthcare institutions, like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, said Shon Anderson, CEO at B9Creations. The targeted, personalized treatment for patients, enables cell culture that mimics an in-vivo environment outside the body without the need to continually extract tissue from patients, he added.

“It’s inspiring and humbling to see the human impact of this technological advancement,” Anderson said.

Ronawk Bio-Block technology; photo courtesy of Ronawk

While other methods force cells into an artificial environment, Ronawk’s Bio-Blocks recreate an environment that allows cells to form tissues as they would naturally. The result is tissue which resembles the native architecture and function of tissue in the body.

This key advantage, Ronawk leaders said, is why Bio-Block cells maintain a high-level of metabolism, viability, and proliferation which leads to superior output in both quantity and quality of the production of a variety of biologics to drive advancements in human and animal biological therapies, diagnostics, prognostics, and countermeasures to biological threats.

“As a biotechnology company with a mission to accelerate next generation therapies, we needed to partner with a company that is as innovative and agile as we are in order to achieve our potential,” said Tom Jantsch, president and COO at Ronawk. “B9Creations’ solutions business model and customizable hardware and software toolset enabled our team to move this effort from R&D into production and commercialization which will democratize access to healthcare research worldwide.”