Nearly a year after Humabiologics was crowned winner of the inaugural AZ Inno Madness competition in 2022, the Phoenix-based regenerative medicine startup is gaining momentum by hiring employees, obtaining funding and shipping products worldwide.
“Great things have been happening since that time and the award for the competition certainly made us more visible,” Mohammad Albanna, Humabiologics founder and CEO, said. "Since April, we started immediately seeing more visibility from businesspeople and several venture capital and angel investors.”
AZ Inno Madness is a bracket-style competition designed to generate awareness of Arizona’s startup ecosystem. Last year, 16 Valley startups competed in the competition over four weeks in March. Humabiologics emerged as the winner over automated document processing company qBotica in the championship round.
Humabiologics is currently undergoing due diligence with undisclosed investors for $2 million in additional seed funding. To date, the company has raised $2 million, separate from the current funding round, Albanna said.
The company, which is based at the Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation at GateWay Community College-Washington Campus, has added three employees who oversee manufacturing, engineering, business development and marketing, Albanna said.
Humabiologics develops and commercializes human-derived biomaterials for translational regenerative medicine applications, such as cell therapy, bioprinting, tissue and disease modeling, and drug screening.
The company's customers are scientists at academic and industry labs, including those at large pharmaceutical companies.
Some of those leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies include Lonza Group, Novartis, Takeda, and biotechnology firm United Therapeutics Corp. Albanna added.
Humabiologics forged a distribution partnership with Massachusetts-based life sciences company ThermoFisher Scientific Inc. to serve researchers and scientists at academic labs working on regenerative medicine research.
The company also has a distribution agreement with VWR, part of Pennsylvania-based chemicals and materials firm Avantor Inc.
Humabiologics expands global products reach
Albanna founded Humabiologics in 2018 as a side operation while working as vice president for clinical and scientific affairs at Pinnacle Transplant Technologies, a human tissue bank in Phoenix that provides donated organs for transplant recipients.
While there, he wanted to find a solution to address the gap between donated human tissues and researchers. Albanna began contacting researchers nationwide to see if they needed biomaterials that could be derived from the tissue.
Humabiologics had a soft launch of products in September 2019 with a formal launch following in January 2020. The company, which says it introduced the world's first native human collagen and gelatin-based bioinks, now ships products to 20 countries.
"We are actually expanding our reach to customers around the world and defining our partnerships with customers in every continent, helping them to translate their discoveries and therapies to the clinic,” Albanna said.
Support from Arizona’s life sciences community as well as city and state officials helped pave the way for the company’s success, Albanna said.
"We started announcing our products in January 2020. Then, Covid hits in March,” Albanna said. “Now, we’re two years out of the pandemic, yet a company in Phoenix is able to have partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies — the ecosystem allowed us to do that.”
AZ Inno is accepting nominations for Inno Madness 2023 through Feb. 10. Nominate a local startup here.
