While the news is unconfirmed and the sources for the information have not been revealed, Shiegeru Sato’s Bloomberg Business report of significant new investments from Japanese companies in Cyfuse, a local 3D bioprinter manufacturer, makes perfect sense from both a business and a biotechnological innovation standpoint.
According to Sato’s report, Cyfuse – which produces the Regenova 3D Bioprinter – agreed to sell a stake in the company to 12 domestic investors, raising a total of ¥1.4 billion (roughly $12 million), which will be used to boost sales force and fund new clinical trials of the device, as the company plans to expand its operations overseas, in the US and China.
The news makes sense as most of the investors (apart from venture capital firms Jafco Co. and University of Tokyo Edge Capital Co.) are companies that operate in the development of medical and biotechnological platforms. The investors include robot exoskeleton and limb manufacturer Cyberdyne Inc, as well as medical device specialists Shibuya Kogyo Co. and health information provider M3 Inc.
The more immediate objectives of Cyfuse, with its Regenova system (available to universities and researchers for more than ¥40 million and, when it launches in the US, approximately $500,000) is to facilitate innovative therapeutic approaches through its bioengineering technologies to make regenerative medicine a reality for patients around the world. The company, founded by Koji Kuchiishi, believes that current injection-cell-suspension or scaffolding-based tissue engineering will be replaced by more efficient and scaffold-less, direct 3D bioprinting methods. The long term goal is to make fully functional complex organ (or complex organs part) replacements.
If all of the technologies produced by the new investors were to be successfully combined, one day, we would be facing the prospect of having access to connected, smart, robotic, and bioprinted – or, in another words, fully bionic – body parts. The process that will takes us there is explained in this video.
Correction 3/9/15: A previous version of this article reported the price of Cyfuse’s Regenova system at $30,000. It is priced at ¥40 million in Japan and will around half a million dollars USD when it launches in the United States.
