ReGEN Biomedical has opened a factory at Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus that makes equipment to create human tissue on a large scale. This tissue should become affordable and, thus, ultimately accessible to all patients. The Maastricht-based company automates cell and tissue culture and inserts it modularly for different tissues. As a result, products are made more consistently, faster, and of higher quality. With this, ReGEN Biomedical aims to establish an innovative manufacturing industry in the Netherlands with a global impact.
“A lot of hard work has gone into building this plant over the past year,” says CEO Prof. Marianne van der Steen. Three years ago, she and Prof. Clemens van Blitterswijk, as founders of ReGEN Biomedical, started the project. “There is a great need worldwide for reliable cell and tissue culture for various purposes such as drug testing without animal testing and ultimately, most importantly, making tissue that we can transplant into patients to cure chronically ill patients. Due to high-quality requirements, such as pure culture methods and safe handling of tissues, there is still a long way to go before we can treat patients, but we expect to deliver the first tissues for drug testing in two years.”
RegMed XB
ReGEN Biomedical is part of RegMed XB‘s national Regenerative Medicine Pilot Plant and a spin-out from Maastricht University. To make this possible, there has been a lot of support from the central government, the Province of Limburg, and Maastricht University. Innovation grants such as the National Growth Fund and ERDF REACT-EU have made building facilities on this scale possible.
Regenerative medicine focuses not on fighting the symptoms of a disease but on true healing. The production lines are designed modularly, and thus, other modules can be inserted for the production of different tissues. This makes it a flexible system for many types of cells and tissues.
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