Halifax life sciences startup 3D BioFibR and collaborator PlantForm Corporation, headquartered in Toronto, are receiving $1.3 million from industry group Next Generation Manufacturing Canada, or NGen.

The money will fund efforts by the two companies to scale 3D BioFibR’s process for manufacturing biofibres — fibres that exist in nature and are used by humans, such as spider silk and collagen — with a particular focus on producing recombinant human collagen for the medical research market.

Scaling 3D BioFibR’s process will involve using PlantForm’s vivoXPRESS platform for creating biologics with the help of plants, rather than the more common approach of using mammalian cells.

“The collaborative project will combine PlantForm's plant-made therapeutic protein manufacturing system with 3DBioFibR's patented, fully automated collagen fiber manufacturing technology to produce collagen fibers at commercial scale that closely resemble the biomechanical and biochemical properties of natural collagen,” the two companies said in a joint statement.

“The work will focus on improving the scale of collagen expression and fiber manufacturing capacity and validating new methodologies for incorporating the recombinant collagen feedstock into the fiber manufacturing process.”

3D BioFibR was founded in 2020 by Sullivan and Chief Scientific Officer John Frampton, a biomedical engineering professor from Dalhousie University. By October of the same year, the company had raised $550,000, followed by another $700,000 of equity funding in 2021.

In June of this year the company launched two products: μCollaFibR and a related offering, CollaFibR, which uses similar underlying technology but takes the form of a three-dimensional scaffolding for cell cultures. And in July, Sullivan’s 12-person team announced they had closed an equity and debt funding round worth $3.52 million.