Central Ohio Helping Fuel State’s Booming Bioscience Industry

Though companies involved in bioscience are making incredible contributions to the world as we know it, bioscience as a discipline is relatively new.  And Central Ohio companies are driving what some are calling a boom in bioscience within the state.

"For the last 10 years, we've been able to document that Ohio bioscience employment has grown 19.5 percent," said Matt Schutte, director of communications at BioOhio.   (This compares to a time when employment as a whole has been shrinking around the state.)

Bioscience is considered a mix of engineering, chemistry and biology.

“It's not a long-term field like physics or chemistry that has been around for decades," said Jed Johnson, PhD, chief technology officer for Nanofiber Solutions, whose company was recently instrumental in the first transplant of a synthetic trachea in an American.

The surgery involved implanting the patient’s own stem cells into a structure (or scaffold) made from electrospun nanofibers and placed in a bioreactor where the stem cells embedded into the nanofibers and multiplied to create the new trachea.  The scaffold, built to the exact biological specifications of the recipient, was created by Johnson right here in Central Ohio at the TechColumbus lab space where Nanofiber Solutions is headquartered.

Nanofiber Solutions is just one of the bioscience companies at TechColumbus that are blurring the lines between engineering and medicine.  Other companies in the incubator include Cytolutions, Diramed, EXCMR, InVasc, JointVue, Linebacker, Minimally Invasive Devices and POCARED.

For the full story see:
http://www.onntv.com/content/stories/2012/01/12/story-bio-science.html