Vancouver-based Aspect Biosystems has raised a $115-million USD ($165 million CAD) Series B round to realize its ambitions of bringing 3D-printed tissue therapies into clinical use.
Aspect has developed 3D-printing technology more at home in the realm of science fiction than Canadian hospitals: it designs and produces 3D-printed living tissue implants in hopes that they will one day be able to replace diseased or damaged tissue inside the human body. Aspect wants to bioprint healthy cells and tissues to treat diseases such as Type 1 diabetes and genetic or acquired liver disease.
“We were quite fortunate in the backdrop of a very difficult biotech climate.”
Tamer Mohamed
CEO of Aspect Biosystems
The financing was led by Dimension, a New York and San Francisco-based firm that focuses on young biotech companies. Other investors included returning Toronto-based Radical Ventures, Crown corporation InBC, Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, Pallasite Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Rhino Ventures, T1D Fund, and one undisclosed investor. Aspect declined to disclose whether the round consisted of any debt or secondary financing.
Dimension closed a $500-million USD fund in December to invest in the intersection of tech and life sciences. Nan Li, founder and managing partner at Dimension, is joining Aspect’s board.
“We were quite fortunate in the backdrop of a very difficult biotech climate,” Aspect co-founder and CEO Tamer Mohamed said in an interview with BetaKit. The round came together in a couple of months, he added, and closed “very recently.”
Indeed, Canada’s biotech sector has seen a funding downturn since 2021, according to PitchBook data, and it has persisted amid a tough fundraising environment for venture capital overall in Canada.
Mohamed told BetaKit that the Series B financing brings the company’s total funding to over $260 million USD. The round will allow Aspect to bring its living tissue printing to the clinic for trials in humans and help expand Aspect’s tissue therapeutic platform, which it says uses AI to power its design tools for printing tissue implants.
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Aspect Biosystems develops tech to print the cells and tissues that make up organs. Its tissue implants are made out of a combination of living cells, derived from stem cells, and biomaterials such as hydrogel polymers. These polymers attract water, giving them a soft and pliable quality similar to human tissue.
For example, the pancreas in Type 1 diabetes patients lacks healthy beta cells that sense glucose and release the hormone insulin to regulate blood sugar levels. Aspect prints healthy beta cells into a tissue implant, with the goal of eventually allowing diabetics to generate their own insulin.
The company believes tissue implants may still be able to function even if they are placed nowhere near the original, damaged organ in the body, Mohamed explained.
“Sometimes the solutions may not be obvious from a human intelligence perspective, and AI could get us to functional tissues that would otherwise be very difficult to get to with purely human intelligence,” Mohamed said.
Mohamed said that Aspect is currently a pre-clinical stage company that hopes to develop into a clinical-stage company over the next few years. This means that the tech has not yet been tested in humans.
Founder and CEO Tamer Mohamed has likened the technology to Star Trek’s replicator, but instead of food and drink on demand, Aspect’s tech would create healthy tissue on demand to replace, repair, or support biological functions that have gone awry.
The public sector is also betting on the biotech. Aspect is slated to open Canada’s first clinical biomanufacturing facility, a $200-million project funded in part by the BC government and the federal government’s Strategic Innovation Fund.
The facility is a continuation of a partnership struck between Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk and Aspect in April 2023. Novo Nordisk, the maker of diabetes and obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, was granted access to Aspect’s bioprinting technology to develop up to four drugs for diabetes, obesity or both. In return, Aspect could receive up to $650 million USD in future milestone payments per product.
The market for bioprinting is expected to grow to over $5 billion USD by 2030, according to a 2024 report from market research firm Meticulous Research, as chronic diseases become more prevalent and a larger share of people are living longer. BC represents a hot market in particular, with VoxCell Bioinnovation developing a high-resolution bioprinter and Axolotl Biosciences replicating brain tissue.
Despite significant US investment, Mohamed said he is “adamant” about keeping Aspect’s operations in Canada as the company targets global growth.
“I’ve been quoted before as saying we want to build a $100-billion anchor company here, and I wasn’t bluffing,” he said.
Feature image courtesy Aspect Biosystems.