An Immigrant’s Journey In 3D Bioprinting

Bioprinting technologies have the potential to help pharmaceutical companies discover and develop new drugs at lower costs, as well as reduce or eliminate the need for animal testing.

Taci Pereira, a Brazilian, immigrant, exemplifies how important immigration and diversity is to innovation, U.S. competitiveness, and our economy. She has deep expertise and a passion for bioengineering and bioprinting. But, while making huge strides in science, she feared that she could be expelled from the U.S. because she didn’t have her green card. Approval for the card took 3 ½ years!—due to the pandemic.

Happily, she got the card and, as CEO of Systemic Bio, she is helping pharmaceutical companies work toward development of new drugs without animals.

Bioprinting Accurately Simulates Human Response to Experimental Drugs

The FDA estimates that 92% of drugs that pass pre-clinical tests, including “pivotal” animal tests, fail to proceed to the market. “That is because animals can’t accurately depict how drugs will function within humans,” said Pereira.

“Bioprinting is the same as 3D printing,” said Pereira. “But instead of plastics or metals, we use biomaterials and cells to create three-dimensional human tissues.” According to Research and Markets, the U.S. is the most significant player in bioprinting. No wonder Pereira wanted to work here!

Systemic Bio, a bioprinting company, launched in September of 2022 with an investment of $15 million from 3D Systems, its parent company. The startup leverages 3D Systems’ advanced bioprinting technology to create precise vascularized organ models using biomaterials and human cells. The organ models are being developed to accurately simulate human response to experimental drugs in the laboratory.

Systemic Bio produces customized chips on its bioprinters capable of at least 10x greater build volume and up to 10X higher resolution than other available platforms, according to a press release by the company. These capabilities enable efficient, production-grade manufacturing. Systemic Bio is currently developing partnerships with pharmaceutical companies that could lead to the discovery of promising new drugs.

An Immigrant’s Journey to Receiving a Green Card Shouldn’t Have Taken So Long

Pereira, at the age of 18, moved to the U.S. on a student visa to go to Harvard for bioengineering on a nearly full scholarship. While in school, she researched tissue engineering and biomaterials for cancer immunotherapy at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

After graduating in 2017, Pereira joined Allevi as a bioengineer. The company’s bioprinters and bioinks are used for research aimed at finding disease cures, testing novel drugs, and eliminating the organ waiting list. She received an Optional Practical Training (OPT), a work permit that allows temporary employment directly related to an F-1 student’s major study area. Pereira rose quickly to chief scientific officer.

She applied for a green card for those with exceptional abilities before the pandemic. “It isn’t easy for [highly skilled] people to stay within the country and do the cutting edge work [they have trained to do],” said Pereira.

She spent three and a half years in limbo. The number of immigrants receiving green cards plummeted during the pandemic. “I couldn’t travel back home to see my family because of the Travel Authorization queue,” sighed Pereira. “I couldn’t plan my life, and I didn’t know whether I would be sent home [to Brazil].”

In 2021, when 3D Systems purchased Allevi, Pereira became bioprinting’s VP and general manager. Her responsibilities were to lead the development and commercialization of research tools for 3D bioprinting applications.

“Thankfully, my green card arrived earlier this year [2022],” she said. When Systemic Bio was formed later that year, Pereira was made CEO.

Immigration plays a vital role in the vitality of the U.S. economy and, more specifically, in Systemic Bio. Highly skilled immigrants grow the economy by driving technological innovation; many of the company’s team are immigrants. Yet, during the pandemic, it took Pereira about 3 1/2 years to get her green card to do her passion’s life-saving work. The process usually takes less than one year.

A Search for Better Technology Results in an Acquisition

“3D bioprinting was in a state like 3D printing was back in the ’90s,” said Pereira. “People were using bioprinting for research prototyping…but it wasn’t being used for production.”

She decided to look for companies that had successfully moved 3D printing technology from prototype into production. She discovered 3D Systems, which was founded in 1986. Since then, 3D Systems evolved its 3D printing solutions from a prototyping technology into additive manufacturing used in industries as unrelated as jewelry, automotive, motorsports, aerospace, and even healthcare.

3D Systems was much more advanced than what Pereira had imagined. She and her Allevi colleagues wanted to use 3D Systems’ technology to create small vessels, or models of human organs and diseases that could be placed on chips to screen for novel drugs. 3D Systems’ technology is unique because scientists can use biological materials to create vascularized structures in any form. “We need to get this manufacturing technology and use it for bioprinting as well and apply it to other areas in biotech,” Pereira told her colleagues at Allevi.

Most important to Allevi was that they could create vascularized tissues, a big challenge in tissue engineering. Our bodies need a vascular system to bring oxygen and nutrients to the cells and organs. “The tissues that we create in the lab also need vasculature to survive,” said Pereira.

While some methods were in use, scalable or reproducible ones were unavailable. “With the expanded capabilities afforded by 3D Systems, we can leverage bioprinting technology in ways other companies can’t,” said Pereira. “And we can do that at production scale. So that’s what’s truly special about what we’re doing, and that’s why we started Systemic Bio.”

The company has a team of 15 scientists working on its platform, called h-VIOS . The acronym stands for human vascularized integrated organ systems. The goal is to create human diseases in the organs on a chip and to partner with pharma companies that want to screen their drugs, eventually with more fidelity than animal testing.

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