Aptus Bioreactors

Aptus Bioreactors provides cardiovascular equipment and consulting services to develop and test living tissue replacements and other medical devices. These technologies will be used to build patient-specific, living heart valves and blood vessels that utilize a patient’s own stem cells and will grow and regenerate for their entire lifetime. A living heart valve replacement could change the prognosis for millions of children and young adults around the world living with heart valve disease. Instead of undergoing open heart surgery every 10-15 years or balancing lifelong blood-thinning medication, their own stem cells and an off-the-shelf scaffold could be used to build a new heart valve that would grow in size with them, providing a life-long, personalized, and maintenance-free solution. However, most researchers are unable to test and develop such a product due to lack of access to bench-top equipment that can effectively re-create cardiovascular conditions experienced by the heart valves. Pulling from over a decade of bioreactor design experience and tissue-engineering research, Aptus Bioreactors was formed to fill this gap. We offer systems and processes that reach and exceed the relevant bodily conditions, are customized to meet each researcher’s specific needs, and allow researchers to test and grow all types, shapes, and sizes of heart valves. The independently-controlled systems can also test many other cardiovascular devices, replace early-stage animal studies, and promise a scalable manufacturing solution. These unique tools for developing and manufacturing tissue-engineered heart valve replacements are protected by three issued utility patents and multiple additional patent applications, for which Aptus Bioreactors has secured exclusive licensing rights.