News From Nanoscribe

There were two notable items from Nanoscribe this past week.

First, the company released a new flexible material for its microfabrication 3D printing system. Nanoscribe’s technology is the resin-based Photonic Professional GT2. They say this is the “World’s highest resolution 3D printer designed for ultra-precise and rapid microfabrication”.

Is it? The GT2 uses a two-photon polymerization approach, in which extremely tiny volumes of resin can be selectively solidified. While the GT2’s build volume is only 100 x 100 x 8 mm (yes, eight mm), it has a minimum feature size of only 160 nm. That is “nm”, not “mm”. In other words, their minimum feature size is 0.00016mm, very small indeed.

The system is used to produce 3D objects at microscale, such as microfluidics, micro-optics, or micro-electromechanical systems.

The new resin material, IP-DMS, is an elastomer, and can be used to produce soft and flexible micro-fabricated objects. This capability could be of considerable interest to those designing micro-machines in an analogous manner to the use of flexible materials on macro-scale 3D prints.

Nanoscribe Acquisition

The other bit of news is that Nanoscribe seems to have been acquired by Sweden-based CELLINK Group.

CELLINK Group is a biostartup company that designed one of the first commercial universal bioinks, the material used in bioprinters. Since 2018 they seem to have been acquiring related companies in the space, including:

• MatTek
• Ginolis
• Scienion
• Cytena
• Dispendix
• Visikol

All of these entities are involved in bioprinting in some way, either liquid handling, single cell printing, in-vitro tech, or bio-analytics.

The acquisition of Nanoscribe would fit very nicely into that growth pattern.

But why Nanoscribe? They explain:

“With Nanoscribe, the CELLINK Group is the world’s first life science company with internal Two-Photon Polymerization (2PP) additive manufacturing capabilities. Nanoscribe’s 2PP technology enables bioprinting of vascular microenvironments at sub-cellular scale, suitable for cell studies and lab-on-a-chip applications, which is expected to contribute to the groups’ product development, yielding additional recurring revenue through fabrication of implants, microneedles, microporous membranes, and consumables for omics applications. There are several strong synergies by combining CELLINK’s cutting-edge macro structural bioprinting technology with Nanoscribe’s micro structural bioprinting technology for more realistic tissue architecture, including vascularization, cell supports. The 2PP technology will enable a cross-functional adoption within all three business areas and enhance consumables product development and offerings of the CELLINK Group.”

Curiously, CELLINK Group has obtained only US$4.3M in investment, so it’s not clear to me how they are paying for these acquisitions. Perhaps a share swap is the approach?

One more thing: CELLINK turns out to be a publicly-traded company, one that I’ve be added to our weekly stock tracker.

Via Nanoscribe and CELLINK