Klona Biotech: 3D bioprinters for tendons, cartilage, and other high-strength human tissues

Klona Biotech’s mission is to make the body parts needed for the most common surgeries accessible and affordable.

We have just reached the point where manufacturing engineered replacement body parts for surgery has become scientifically feasible. Bioprinting – 3D printing tissues – has become a leading scientific technique for this due to its technical superiority and practicality for scaling manufacturing. However, the most needed tissues aren’t soft organs but structural tissues like ligaments/tendons, cartilage, skin, and heart valves, making up >95% of the targets of replacement and reconstruction surgeries. These tissues have high mechanical requirements which cannot be made using conventional bioprinting technologies developed for delicate tissues like the liver.

Here at Klona Biotech, we have built the first bioprinting system specifically designed from the ground up for printing structural tissues. Our proprietary printing system uses our patent pending printhead technology to print structures more than 50x the strength of conventional bioprints, without sacrificing – instead, enhancing – biocompatibility and final tissue architecture. We are building the future manufacturing layer needed for next generation surgical replacements which heal faster, better, and more reliably.

We are first using our bioprinting platform to develop an implant for reinforcing rotator cuff repairs, a procedure performed 500,000 times per year in the USA alone. We expect this implant to significantly reduce rotator cuff re-tear rates – which can be as high as 80% in certain high-risk patient populations – and improve long-term patient outcomes. This implant can be produced cheaply using our platform and sold using a traditional medical device business model at a high margin, in the same price band as current incumbents. We expect FDA clearance of this first implant by late 2028. Leveraging the capabilities of our 3D printing manufacturing platform, we expect to be able to rapidly expand the indication of this first implant to other tendons and ligaments, and even into the veterinary surgery market.

Looking further forward, Klona’s printing technology allows it to rapidly prototype, produce, iterate, and enhance new implants for the $174B global structural tissue market – a market which is rapidly growing due to the world’s aging population. We plan to leverage this platform capability to fill a multi-generational product pipeline across orthopedic indications, in the long-term expanding to other tissue systems with strict mechanical requirements like the cardiovascular system.