Our Biotechnology Platform

 Our biotechnology platform allows any live cells, tissue, or organs, to be encapsulated, manipulated, and released from our novel hydrogel materials without physically or chemically damaging the biological sample. We develop selectively enzymatically degradable bioinspired materials suitable for the isolation of tissues or organs without any attached foreign material (scaffold-free) in order to create a new approach for ex vivo tissue production. Additionally, the biological sample is produced and isolated under sterile conditions which tackles infection problems originating from non-sterile whole-size donor samples. 

The material is designed in a way that upon degradation of the cell culture carrier, any cell-cell and cell-matrix contacts as well as the extracellular matrix of the formed tissue remains chemically and physically untouched. The user has full control over the time point of degradation (e.g. cells reach confluence) with the addition of a selective enzyme at a low concentration. The culture carrier itself is degraded to small, water-soluble molecules, which enables to receive a free-floating, artificial tissue without the necessity of any carrier material.

As a proof of concept, we have demonstrated the usefulness of this technique creating scaffold-free corneal endothelial cell sheet (DMEK graft artificially produced from a few donated cells rather than whole donor graft) ex vivo. This type of tissue is a simple polarized cell monolayer, but at the same time extremely challenging in its production and transfer because of its very fragile nature. The DMEK tissues produced in an artificial environment using our technology showed identical behavior (e.g. tissue scroll) compared to native donor tissues, but with a cell density/quality more than 1.5/2-fold greater than common donated DMEK tissues.

We are convinced that our technology to produce fully functional and scaffold-free tissue grafts (implants) will be readily available to cure corneal blindness worldwide.