Bi/ond secures over $4M in funding

Organ-on-a-chip success with leading European European research institutions fuels Bi/ond Investment.

$4+ Million Raised to Date with FORWARD.one Leading

SAN FRANCISCO, California and DELFT, Netherlands, March 4th, 2022 – Bi/ond, one of the world’s leading Organ-on-a-Chip technology firms, today announced that its commercial and clinical success working with two of Europe’s top 10 leading medical centers has led to a total of over $4 million in funding, including investment from the leading industrial venture firm FORWARD.one.

Bi/ond’s technology has already been deployed across Europe, including at Leiden University Medical Center, where clinicians are making heart tissues using Bi/ond’s microchips and Erasmus University Medical Center where researchers are using patients’ own breast cancer samples to guide therapy. The Bi/ond organ-on-chip platform combines 3-D microfluidic cell cultures with an integrated circuit (microchip) to simulate the biological activity, mechanics and physiological response of an entire organ or organ system.

Bi/ond is led by Cinzia Silvestri, PhD., a leader in nanomaterials and silicon microfabrication for biotechnology who has also been acknowledged for advancing diversity in a male-dominated sector.

“Balancing microelectronics with the delicate requirements of tissue and muscle development on a chip is the hardest part of developing Organ-on-a-Chip and that’s what we cracked early on,” said Dr. Silvestri, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Bi/ond. “This new investment has come not just because of the innovations that we developed in these areas, but also because of the clinical proof our partners demonstrated in the laboratories across Europe’s leading medical organizations. We thank FORWARD.one for leading the round and recognizing this.”

“Cinzia and her team have done an amazing job of creating innovations around Organ-on-a-Chip and getting the platform into the hands of clinicians so that they can deliver therapeutics to patients,” said Robin van Boxsel, Partner at FORWARD.one. “We are a strong believer that their technology will play a key role in improving future drug development and we are excited to be part of their journey.”

The Bi/ond platform enables the culturing of complex 3D tissues (organoids, ex vivo tissue, spheroids and microtissues) for applications in kidney research, oncology and cardiac simulation.

  • At the Leiden University Medical Center, Bi/ond chips are used to create the environment for beating heart muscle tissues derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Such induced pluripotent stem cells can be made, for example, from the skin of patients, allowing clinicians to obtain heart tissue with the patient’s genetic background. They are now starting to expose the beating heart tissues to drugs to analyze how they respond, potentially to predict how patients will respond as well.
  • At the Erasmus University Medical Center, researchers have built a microfluidic platform for the assessment of treatment response using patients’ own tumor tissue slices under precisely controlled growth conditions. This enables them to keep breast cancer tumor tissues alive for a long time to study responses to chemotherapy and to choose the proper treatment for each individual cancer patient.

“We’re using Bi/ond for breast cancer therapy response in a more controlled way that enables us to use tissue slices for long-term research, something that has not been possible for us before,” said Dr. Dik Van Gent.

About Bi/ond

Bi/ond is one of the global leaders in Organ-on-a-Chip technologies.

Organ-on-a-Chip combines 3-D microfluidic cell cultures with a microchip to simulate the behavior, mechanics and physiological response of an entire organ or organ system. The expertise of Dr. Nikolas Gaio, Bi/ond Chief Technology Officer has enabled the company to deliver reproducible and scalable chips for high content biological assay, something that is critical for consistency and ongoing monitoring in clinical research.

The company has raised more than $4 million in funding, including a lead by the industrial venture firm FORWARD.one, which specializes in investing in game-changing high-tech innovations.

Media Enquiries

biond@consortpartners.com

Q&A #OoCovid initiative

Nikolas Gaio, founder and CTO of Bi/ond, and Rosa Monge, founder and CEO of BEOnChip chats about the #OoCovid initiative and the importance of organ-on-chip.


Why did Bi/ond launch the #OoCovid initiative?

Niko: When the Covid19 outbreak started to hit Europe, everyone in BI/OND was sure that Organ-on-Chip technology could have a real impact in the fight against the Covid19. We noticed the Organ-on-Chip community was not reacting fast enough. So we decided to do something about it, and we came up with the #OoCovid initiative. This challenge aimed at three main goals.

Patient First:
First and foremost, we wanted to help Covid-19 patients by promoting donations to researchers working on studying the disease and its effects on the human body.
Unity is Strength:
Second, the initiative aimed at convincing all the OOC startups and companies to join forces and work together for a solution.
Need for change:
Third, we wanted to raise awareness regarding the need for new ways of developing drugs and vaccines, to prove that OoC is a valuable alternative.

Why did you join the #OoCovid initiative?

Rosa: Covid19 has caught us completely off-guard and has caused a global crisis that will take years to overcome. This pandemic has shown us all how fragile our economy is and how unprepared our health systems were for a worldwide pandemic. Now is the time for innovation in vitro-research, to speed up the development of new drugs, treatments and vaccines for new diseases such as Covid19. We believe that the Organ on Chip technology will have a key role in future biomedical research, and the #OoCovid initiative aims to put the OoC technology in the spotlight. #OoCovid will help researchers and private companies to understand better the possibilities of the next generation of in vitro research platforms and the importance of adopting this technology early.

How could OoC research contribute to find a solution for viruses such as the coronavirus?

Niko: We believe that OoCs will show their full potential in understanding the effect of Covid-19 on the human body. The combination of OoC and 3D tissues, such as organoids, should not only enable us to understand the mechanisms behind the infection and the damages caused by the virus on lungs, kidneys, heart but also how it interacts with the whole immune system.

Rosa: OoC technology is a powerful tool that will contribute significantly to finding solutions to the medical crisis in the future. OoC can enable us to create models of healthy organs such as a lung-on-chip, that will help us understand better the infection process or test the toxicity of a new treatment in a fast and reliable way. In addition, Organ on a chip technology allows us to model diseased organs and allows us to screen a drug efficacy using cells from a specific population group, that is known to be more susceptible to contracting an illness.

The possibilities are uncanny, and the OoC field is just currently blooming.

Which are the current limits of OoC research and could they be overcome by collaborating more within fields?

Rosa: The field is multidisciplinary. This technology combines the latest advances in tissue engineering with novel developments in microfabrication. Therefore, it is compulsory to create new communication channels between engineers and biomedical researchers to design functional, cheap and easy to use platforms.

What is the role of OOC companies in bridging the gap between research and industry?

Rosa: OoC companies have an enormous task to gather the most relevant advances in OoC technology and take them from the lab to the industry by creating reliable platforms. These platforms will save time and money for researchers and companies that can directly focus on the goal at hand: testing the efficacy or toxicity of a drug, without worrying and spending time in cell culture and organ model validation.

This will pave the way for a faster and more responsive health-care system worldwide, capable of overcoming unexpected crises such as this one.

Niko: OoC has shown to be an extremely versatile technology with a wide range of applications. OoC companies, like BI/OND and BeOnChip, have the duty to identify the applications that will have a real impact on tomorrow’s health-care. At the same time, we have to take into consideration that, to make these technologies widely available, we need to develop technologies that address the day to day issues faced by biologists working in pharmaceutical companies.

We believe that OoC will contribute to advancing the global health-care system, by proving safe, personalized and reliable solutions.

Bi/ond won the Philips innovation award

We are extremely excited to announce that BI/OND won the Philips Innovation award last night.
This is a huge achievement for us and it will push the team to go further and faster! We would like to thank the jury,
the organizers and Philips for believing in us.

If you want to know more about last night, we gave an interview to rtlz.nl.

You can watch it following this link: 1. RTLZ Winnaar innovation award 2019
Or trough this link 

To know more about the Philips Innovation Award follow this link: https://www.phia.nl/

Nikolas Gaio won a lush prize

The 16th of November one of our founders, Nikolas Gaio, was awarded in Berlin with a Young Researcher Award in the Lush Prize 2018 for his work ‘Replacing animal tests with silicon chips’.

Continue reading

Bi/ond joins forces

Bi/ond joins forces with the Eindhoven University of Technology and Luxembourg
University to develop a Midbrain-on-a-Chip model for Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder in the ageing
population. It is characterized by the progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia
nigra region of the brain. Despite intensive research, the cause of the disease is still elusive, and
there is currently no disease-modifying therapy for its treatment. Therefore, it is crucial to achieving
a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying neuronal degeneration. A major shortcoming
toward this goal is the lack of human-specific predictive models for PD.
A promising approach is the development of human brain organoids, self-assembled from
induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC), as systems to better mimic in vivo physiology. However,
maintaining these organoids alive for extended periods in standard in vitro conditions is extremely
challenging. Due to their structural complexity and large size, these three-dimensional tissue models
often suffer from suboptimal oxygen and nutrition supply, which severely limits their viability.

Cinzia Silvestri in the inspiring fifty list

The BI/OND team is proud to announce that Cinzia Silvestri, Co-Founder, and CEO of BI/OND, was included in the 2018 Inspiring Fifty list (Italy).

This award celebrates incredible women excelling in tech careers. Cinzia’s leadership and achievements prove that this is an industry in which women can thrive against unfavourable odds.

Cinzia was chosen among hundreds of candidates by a though jury (https://italy.inspiringfifty.org/judges/). Well done!

If you want to read more about the award and Cinzia story check this link: