The Department of Defense announced the award of a new public-private Manufacturing USA institute to Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) today. This new institute will be the 12th Manufacturing USA institute established, with the Department of Defense now leading seven of the 12.
“The investments we are making in advanced manufacturing, including today’s announcement, will ensure that the innovations needed to develop, manufacture and commercialize cutting-edge processes and materials will happen right here, in America,” said Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
“They will provide important benefits to our war fighters and will help strengthen the economy that is the bedrock of our national security.”
Headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire, ARMI is part of continuing efforts to help revitalize American manufacturing and incentivize companies to invest in new technology development in the United States.
The highly competitive process resulted in ARMI’s selection to lead the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication (ATB) Manufacturing USA Institute. The award of $80 million in federal funding will be combined with over $214 million contributed by the winning consortium, made up of industry, state and local governments, universities, community colleges, and non-profit organizations located across the country.
The ATB institute, with founding industrial and academic partners in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, California, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland, seeks to organize the current fragmented domestic capabilities in tissue biofabrication technology and better position the U.S. relative to global competition.
Biofabrication is an innovative manufacturing industry segment at the intersection of biology-related research, computer science, materials science and engineering that is creating state-of-the-art manufacturing innovations in biomaterial and cell processing, bioprinting, automation and non-destructive testing technologies for critical Department of Defense and novel commercial use.
ARMI, Inc. will integrate the diverse and fragmented collection of industry practices and institutional knowledge across many disciplines to realize the potential of a robust biofabrication manufacturing ecosystem.
Technologies ripe for significant evolution within the ATB institute include, but are not limited to, high-throughput culture technologies, 3D biofabrication technologies, bioreactors, storage methodologies, non-destructive evaluation, real-time monitoring/sensing, and detection technologies.
ATB joins the Manufacturing USA institute network which is a bipartisan program that brings together industry, academia, and government to co-invest in the development of world-leading manufacturing technologies and capabilities.
(Learn More, courtesy of USC Price and YouTube)
Each Manufacturing USA institute focuses on a technology area critical to future competitiveness—such as 3D printing, integrated photonics, or smart sensors. Across the Manufacturing USA institutes, the federal government has committed $860 million, which has been matched by $1.8 billion in non-federal investment.
Together, the Manufacturing USA institutes are already enhancing U.S. competitiveness in advanced manufacturing—from helping Youngstown, OH attract over $90 million in new manufacturing investments to its region and train 14,000 workers in the fundamentals of 3D printing for businesses, to supporting companies like X-FAB in Lubbock, Texas, upgrade to cost-competitive, next-generation semiconductors and sustain hundreds of jobs.
The ATB Manufacturing USA institute includes:
Forty-seven industrial partners, including Abbott, Autodesk, Becton Dickinson, Celularity, DEKA Research & Development, GenCure, Humacyte, Lonza, Medtronic, Rockwell Automation, and United Therapeutics.
Twenty-six academic and academically affiliated partners, including Arizona State University, Boston University, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutgers, Stanford University, the University of Florida, the University of Minnesota, the University of New Hampshire, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Yale University.
Fourteen government and nonprofit partners, including FIRST, the State of New Hampshire, and manufacturing extension partnerships in multiple states.
For more information regarding this program overall and this institute in particular, visit the website at https://www.manufacturingusa.com/.
