TB diagnostic cassette produced by Carbon in a collaboration with Intellectual Ventures and Bill Gates’ Global Good Fund.
With a novel approach to 3D manufacturing, Carbon seeks to work with medtech and biopharma companies to develop a wide range of medical devices. Although it currently produces dental models and surgical guides for the dental industry and shoes for Adidas, CEO Joe DeSimone said the company is working with medical device manufacturers and physicians to develop diverse products spanning pediatric tracheal stents, a diagnostic test for TB, to drug delivery tools to treat pancreatic cancer. He talked about the medtech production business in an interview at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week.
DeSimone also shared the news that it added Johnson & Johnson Innovation to a $200 million in Series D round, which closed last month, as part of a collaboration with the medical device giant to support the development of orthopedic tools. J&J is harnessing the company’s printers to disrupt the supply chain with disposable devices.
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Carbon’s 3D printers rely on a technology it refers to as Digital Light Synthesis and programmable liquid resins. The goal is to get the right balance between a strong but flexible product that is faster to produce than current 3D printing processes. The company provides its devices to companies on a subscription basis that include software tools, training and design services and customized data and analytics. The idea is to accelerate the manufacturing process and give companies greater flexibility in product development.
“Once you go digital, you can’t go back,” said DeSimone. “You can move at lightening speeds. It’s like the difference between a mimeograph machine and a laser printer.”
Last year, Carbon moved into the dental industry, producing dental models and surgical guides with a low regulatory burden with dental production center, Core3dcentres. Dentists could use its technology to develop customized dentures. But it’s work in the life sciences industry goes deeper than that. In the orthopedics industry, it is collaborating with Spanish company Xkelet to produce customized splints that are more comfortable for patients to wear and give them greater flexibility.
Pediatric medical devices is another area of interest. This subsector of medical devices tends to be underserved because it is smaller than the adult market and products need to be easily adjusted for a variety of sizes. But 3D printing offers a way to customize devices to the needs of growing children. In a collaboration with Children’s Minnesota Hospital, Carbon created 3D printed airway stents, which will be tested in preclinical studies. The stents would be used to treat bronchomalacia — an abnormal softening of the walls of the airways. They can also be customized to the variations in thickness, length, and diameter for a child’s airway.
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Carbon is also in the diagnostics space. It worked with the Global Good Fund, a collaboration between Intellectual Ventures and Bill Gates, to develop technologies for humanitarian impact, to produce a tuberculosis assay for developing countries without the traditional production costs associated with diagnostics.
Despite its collaboration with global corporations, DeSimone emphasized that the business also works with startups as well. One example is Advanced Chemotherapy Technologies, which is developing treatments for pancreatic cancer using Iontophoresis — a targeted drug delivery approach that can reduce tumor size. Carbon has worked with the biotech business to develop the implants used to deliver this treatment. Another is AnelleO, which produced an intravaginal ring to deliver progesterone for infertility treatment.
