What if the factories of the future were alive? BIOlogic has spent years exploring how bacteria can produce materials for everything from fashion to cosmetics. Now, that same knowledge is taking the team somewhere new: towards advanced wound care.
In a laboratory, a colony of bacteria is quietly at work. Given the right conditions, these microorganisms can produce bacterial nanocellulose: an exceptionally pure, three-dimensional network of cellulose with properties that make it useful as a biomaterial.
For the team behind BIOlogic Laboratory, the possibility prompted a simple but radical question: what if microorganisms could become the workers of a new kind of factory?
That question has guided their work since 2017. The team calls the idea “biologisation”: learning from nature and harnessing living systems to produce useful materials while reducing pressure on the planet. What they did not know at the beginning was where that idea would eventually take them.
From fashion to wounds
BIOlogic, the Research and Development laboratory of Knowledge for Business, did not start with a medical product in mind. Its researchers began with the material itself. Bacterial nanocellulose or BNC can retain large amounts of water, conform closely to irregular surfaces and remain mechanically stable when wet. Unlike plant-derived cellulose, it can also be produced by bacteria without first extracting and aggressively breaking down plant material.
The team began exploring what could be done with it. Through its early Scobiskin research and the subsequent Scokin platform, bacterial nanocellulose found its way into experiments spanning cosmetics, textiles, fashion, design and packaging.
At first glance, a piece of experimental biomaterial designed for fashion may seem far removed from a wound dressing. But each application was teaching the researchers something.
Cosmetics helped them understand hydration, purity and the delivery of active ingredients. Textiles and design forced them to improve thickness, mechanical properties, finishing and scale-up. Circular-economy projects explored how alternative substrates and upcycled streams could be incorporated into production.
“These were not separate detours,” the team explains. “Together, they created the knowledge base that now supports our medical direction.” And that direction emerged as the researchers began recognising something important. Many of the qualities they had spent years learning to control could potentially answer a very different problem.
Rethinking what a wound dressing should do
For people living with chronic wounds, fragile skin or burns, changing a dressing can become a repeated source of discomfort. Some conventional dressings can adhere to the wound bed or struggle to maintain the balance of moisture, exudate management and gas exchange required for healing. For hard-to-heal wounds, repeated interventions can also place a burden on patients, carers and healthcare services.
BIOlogic began asking whether bacterial nanocellulose could offer another approach. Rather than simply covering a wound, could a dressing help create a stable, hydrated and comfortable environment around it?
Its nanofibrillar structure and high water-retention capacity make BNC particularly interesting for this purpose. It can conform to irregular surfaces while maintaining its structure when wet. It could also potentially act as a carrier for antimicrobial or regenerative active ingredients.
The ambition is to turn an unusual biological material into a platform for advanced wound dressings. But there is an important distinction between promising material properties and a medical product.
BIOlogic’s biomedical application remains at laboratory stage. Concept design, early prototypes and preliminary validation have begun, but further work is needed on functionalisation, biocompatibility, sterilisation, stability and preclinical development before its potential in healthcare can be established. That next step may prove harder than growing the material itself.
When biology refuses to behave like a factory
One of the attractions of biological manufacturing is also one of its complications: living systems are not conventional production lines. “BNC is grown, not simply manufactured,” the team says. Small changes during fermentation, purification or drying can alter the thickness, hydration, porosity and mechanical behaviour of the resulting material.
For healthcare, consistency becomes critical. The team must demonstrate reproducibility and purity while addressing sterility, endotoxin removal and batch-to-batch variation all without destroying the properties that make the material interesting in the first place.
Then come the clinical and regulatory questions. Which type of wound should be targeted first? How should the dressing be sterilised? What evidence will be required? How might functionalising the material change its regulatory classification?
“The challenge is therefore not simply to make a good material,” the team explains. “It is to design a manufacturable, validated medical device around it.” It is a significant transition: from asking what can this material do? to asking what would it take for somebody to use it safely?
The value of taking the long way round
BIOlogic’s journey challenges a familiar idea about innovation: that progress should follow the shortest possible route from problem to solution. Its experience suggests something different.
The years spent moving between cosmetics, textiles, design and circular production were not distractions from healthcare. They built the knowledge that is now making a biomedical application conceivable.
That philosophy also shapes the team’s advice to other researchers. “Do not fall in love only with the technology; fall in love with the problem and with the evidence needed to solve it.” A promising result in the laboratory, they argue, is a beginning rather than a product. Researchers need to speak with clinicians, users, regulators, manufacturers and those who may eventually adopt or pay for their solution.
They also need to recognise knowledge when it appears somewhere unexpected. “Work developed for one market may reveal the process control, performance data or business insight needed in another.” It is why the team makes a distinction between persistence and something more valuable: informed persistence.
Building a bridge to healthcare
Moving into medicine now requires BIOlogic to enter an ecosystem different from those that supported its work in fashion, cosmetics and design. That is where BRIDGE enters the story.
The team joined the BRIDGE Genesis4LifeScience programme to help translate its material platform into a healthcare proposition shaped not only by science, but also by clinical needs, regulation, manufacturing and commercial reality.
Through the BRIDGE Business Bootcamp and mentoring activities, the team wants to identify the most credible first clinical application, sharpen its product profile and establish a roadmap for biocompatibility testing, sterilisation, stability and eventual preclinical validation.
What happens next?
Ask the team what they would like to be able to say one year from now and the answer is deliberately concrete. They want a clearly defined first indication. A reproducible wound-dressing prototype. Key biocompatibility and functional tests completed. A credible sterilisation and stability pathway. A regulatory roadmap. And, ideally, a strategic clinical or industrial partner.
These may sound like technical milestones. Together, however, they would represent something much bigger: evidence that a material first explored across seemingly unrelated industries can begin the journey towards healthcare.
BIOlogic describes its team in three words: multidisciplinary, creative and translational. Perhaps that also describes the story itself. A bacterium becomes a microscopic worker. A biofilm becomes a material. A material explored for fashion becomes a potential platform for wound care.
Innovation, it turns out, does not always come from knowing exactly where you are going. Sometimes it comes from learning enough along the way to recognise a new destination when it appears.