About the Biodevice Foundry
The Conconi Family Biodevice Foundry is a new UBC core facility and the first of its kind in Western Canada to be designed and oriented for life sciences applications. The unique capability of the facility is that it interfaces standard cleanroom microdevice manufacturing processes with cutting-edge life sciences research. It aims to develop solutions to common challenges by consolidating specialized infrastructure and technological expertise, nucleating a pool of experts and giving them the technological capabilities to create translation-centric solutions to biomedical and clinical problems. The Foundry will re-imagine the concept of a core facility, not only implementing off-the-shelf biodevices for users but also creating custom solutions by innovating novel materials, techniques, and biodevice types.
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Purpose-designed Facility
The Foundry has been designed to fill a critical gap in Western Canada. Currently, researchers must locate tools that are scattered across multiple sites, each with a different set of constraints, often leading to material/substrate incompatibilities and logistical challenges that slow innovation. The Foundry will overcome these limitations by providing end-to-end services (biodevice design, fabrication, and prototyping) to support scientific innovation in academia and the private sector in Western Canada. We have identified the key tools to enable these services and designed a facility that integrates them to provide the most generalizable support possible for the biodevice innovation pipeline.
The Foundry aims to create thought leadership in the design, fabrication, and application of biodevices to overcome diverse biomedical challenges arising across scales, from molecules to organisms; from deconvolving systemic biological mechanisms by building compartmentalized bioengineered models, to solving optimization challenges in the synthesis of therapeutic agents through in-line process monitoring. The facility enables innovative research and development, with a particular focus on precision medicine, taking a “quantitative-first” approach by integrating sensitive bioanalytical assays to monitor biological processes and thus avoid the reproducibility concerns that often hamper clinical translation.
Technology Areas
The Foundry’s cutting-edge biodevice technology development is organized into three main technology areas: (i) Bioanalytics-on-a-chip, (ii) Organ-on-a-chip, and (iii) Biomanufacturing-on-a-chip devices. While the Foundry is a versatile facility with applications in all life sciences fields, an early set of exemplar projects designed by our core team members will leverage UBC’s existing areas of research excellence.[KG4] These projects span all three technology areas, with applications from early detection and screening to diagnostics and treatment. However, many of the challenges arising in these projects are also common bottlenecks in other fields. These include the need for separation and sensitive quantitation of diverse and complex sets of biomolecules across vast dynamic ranges of detection, spatial profiling of tissues and organs, and integrated modelling of the interactions between different biological systems in medium-throughput (and eventually high-throughput) formats that can be integrated into existing analytic and manufacturing workflows. With leadership from a diverse team of UBC experts and access to state-of-the-art infrastructure and materials, the Foundry will pave the way for the cross-disciplinary applications of emerging technologies to overcome current challenges.
1) Bioanalytics-on-a-chip devices (measure): Sensors and related technology for highly sensitive and specific multiplexed biomarker assays, to quantitatively approach biological questions.
2) Organ-on-a-chip devices (model): Complex, human-based tissue models combine and compartmentalize organ-relevant cell types, biomaterials, and micro/nano-fabricated modules to recreate (patho)physiological phenotypes ex vivo and provide potential solutions for regenerative medicine.
3) Biomanufacturing-on-a-chip devices (make): Microscale-engineered systems for biosynthesis / biomanufacturing applications, including therapeutic and theragnostic production.
The Future of Health
The Conconi Family Biodevice Foundry will help users accelerate basic, translational, and preclinical research projects, as well as advanced biomanufacturing process development, across multiple fields. The primary outcomes of the Foundry will thus be improved health for Canadians via the development of new disease-specific diagnostics, therapeutics, and monitoring devices. This work will also have substantial socioeconomic benefits for Canada in terms of the direct and indirect creation of new positions for highly qualified personnel (HQP) and the provision of high-quality training in cutting-edge technology, helping to retain locally developed talent in BC and Canada. Our work will also create extensive new Canadian intellectual property for UBC and local private-sector users, which will in turn create new ventures, jobs, and revenue.