Business leader’s talk at manufacturing summit underscores biofab project’s regional outreach beyond the Manchester Millyard

Ned Gordon, senior business leader of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, talks about the Manchester biofabrication effort during a keynote address Oct. 4 at the New Hampshire Manufacturing Extension Partnership’s annual summit in Windham. (Photo by Kendal Bush/ARMI)

As Ned Gordon began his keynote address to a few hundred people from the state’s manufacturing sector, he asked for a show of hands.

He wanted to know how many of them had heard of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI).

The senior business leader for ARMI — the effort to make Manchester the global hub for the mass production of human cells, tissue and organs — was pleased by the response.

Gordon can expect more hands to shoot up the next time he shows up somewhere to talk about ARMI. The leadership team behind the nonprofit established by inventor Dean Kamen in 2017 has been doing a lot of outreach lately.

Gordon’s Oct. 4 appearance at the New Hampshire Manufacturing Extension Partnership’s annual summit in Windham was the third of four local business conferences over two weeks where ARMI was on the agenda.

Representatives from ARMI participated in discussions about the project and its ecosystem’s needs — education, workforce, housing, child care — at the Greater Manchester Chamber’s Access 24 conference on Sept. 24, the NH Tech Alliance’s Innovation Summit on Oct. 3 and the launch event for New Hampshire Life Sciences, a new trade group, on Oct. 5.

ARMI hosted an investors conference Oct. 15 and 16 at its Millyard headquarters to address its most pressing need: money.

While the project has amassed nearly a half billion dollars in seed funding from several federal grants and matching in-kind services from more than 200 member organizations, the support of private investors will ultimately determine its long-term success.

“These startups need a lot of money,” Gordon said, fielding a question from NH Business Review about ARMI’s greatest challenges. “The government has been unbelievably supportive, but we really do.”

The merging of biology and engineering is the key component of creating an efficient method to mass produce human cells and tissue, he said.

“I think the science is tough, but I really admire our biologists in particular. To them, getting cells to differentiate in a particular direction is just like waking up and having a cup of coffee in the morning,” said Gordon, a chemical engineer.

“The engineering part is really important. For all of you in the manufacturing sector, you know how important engineering is from a consistency and a quality and a cost-effective approach,” he said.

“That’s what I think is novel about ARMI, of marrying the science and the engineering together, because that’s what you need. You can’t have a bunch of biologists running off making a manufacturing line, and you can’t have a bunch of engineers running around thinking they know the science.”

Ending the transplant list

Gordon’s professional stake in ARMI is anchored by his personal life: His wife and daughter suffer from kidney disease. He noted that 100,000 patients are waiting for a kidney transplant.

“My wife had one. Six years ago, I donated one of my kidneys so she could get one from another living donor who matched her in terms of blood type and tissue type,” Gordon said.

His daughter ultimately will need a transplant as well, he said.

“I joined ARMI to put an end to that transplant list. We are creating the manufacturing industry to produce replacement tissues and organs,” Gordon said.

“That is, in a nutshell, who we are and what we do. We are building the industry that is going to make these replacement tissues and organs.”

ARMI’s member organizations include research institutions and community colleges. About 60% to 70% are from industry. Most significantly, about 80% of those companies are startups, Gordon said.

“That’s a reflection of how new, nascent, emerging this industry is. All the technology is really coming out of academia into spinouts that are bringing the innovation to the manufacturing, and they’re small organizations,” he said.

ARMI is working with one startup that has developed a treatment for age-related macular degeneration that has already completed a few human studies.

“We can take a little membrane, take some stem cells, get them to differentiate into retinal pigment epithelial cells, put them onto that membrane, mature it. And now you have a little patch that can be implanted in the back of the eye on the retina that regains the sight for patients,” Gordon said.

ARMI is helping the company create a way to mass produce the treatment.

“What we’re doing for them is making an automated manufacturing system that will allow them to produce, ultimately at scale, in a way that’s going to be cost effective and consistent from patch to patch and batch to batch,” he said.

Creating those processes and the infrastructure to support them is ARMI’s long journey.

“At the end of the day, there’s a patient who’s waiting for this,” Gordon said. “At the end of the day, there’s a startup that needs help and support to bring their innovation, their innovative manufacturing process to the clinic, to the patient who needs it, or someone who’s developing.