About CM2OST
The Center for Modular Manufacturing of Structural Tissues (CM2oST) is a joint effort of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute’s BioFabUSA team to address the manufacturing challenges and promote new technologies to support manufacturing replacement human cells, tissues and organs in a scalable, consistent and cost-effective manner.
Despite significant advances over several decades, very few Tissue Engineered Medical Products (TEMPs) have been clinically or commercially successful. There is a growing need for TEMPs in multiple applications, but a significant technology gap, known as the “Valley of Death”, has prevented their scalable, consistent and cost-effective manufacture. We therefore believe that now is the time for a bold shift from the “Case Center for Multimodal Evaluation of Engineered Cartilage” with its focus on cartilage-centric evaluation technologies to instead develop, demonstrate, and deploy novel technologies to enable Quality-by-Design manufacturing of a variety of structural tissues, and to, thus, bridge the aforementioned Valley of Death.
Our objective is now to promote the adoption of our technologies by the TEMP community at large. Consequently, the center will be renamed “Center for Modular Manufacturing of Structural Tissues” (CM2OST), and will apply knowledge and technology developed during the center’s first five years to manufacturing-oriented challenges.
- Assist our Collaborative Projects and Service Projects by pushing the technologies developed by the Center's four Technology Research and Development Projects (TR&Ds) out to them.
- Through our TR&Ds, develop a cohesive set of innovative technologies, methods, and protocols that enable structural tissue manufacturing,
- Develop a new, state-of-the-art, training and dissemination program.
Focus & Capabilities
The Center has the following foci: control of cell phenotype and function, smart scaffold development, bioinstructive bioreactors, and finally integration and automation, each focused in its own TR&D project area. In addition, the Center’s TR&D’s offer services to other researchers through collaborative and service projects as listed in the Available Services section below.
TR&D-1 covers dynamic control of cell phenotype and function during the manufacturing process, and development of tissue-specific sensors for dynamic non-invasive monitoring of cell phenotype and function.
TR&D-2 integrates sensors and biosensors into scaffolds to measure/monitor cellular attachment and function.
TR&D-3 develops bio-instructive bioreactors with integrated actuators and sensors for feedback control, and will physically integrate them with the Tissue Foundry, an ARMI prototype automated TEMP assembly line.
TR&D-4 integrates sensors and actuators with the automation and data management system of the Tissue Foundry, and will perform a manufacturing demonstration run.
