Manchester inventor and DEKA founder Dean Kamen is heading the new Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute in the Manchester Millyard. He gave a tour of some of the spaces Wednesday.(DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER) Manchester inventor and DEKA and ARMI founder Dean Kamen gives a tour of the new entry area at DEKA headquarters at Manchester on Wednesday.(DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER) MANCHESTER --Inventor Dean Kamen hopes Manchester can become the Silicon Valley for regenerative medicine, attracting researchers and companies to collaborate and make human skin, blood and organs.

Some ideas "almost seem like science fiction," Kamen said during an interview at his company, DEKA Research & Development Corp., in the Millyard.

More than 80 companies, universities and other organizations have signed on to the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute that Kamen is heading at 400 Commercial St.

"ARMI wants to connect all the research, the billions of dollars that's already been spent to create these miracles and the billions that's going to need to be spent to bring them to the public that needs them to offer the public what will be trillions of dollars of medical care value," Kamen said last week. "ARMI just wants to accelerate all those connections to happen."

"Imagine all of these researchers have these miracles in their laboratories," Kamen said, but getting their discoveries into production may be beyond their capabilities.

ARMI has received $80 million in federal funding and another $214 million in cash and in-kind donations from the various partners.

Changing lives

"Literally, probably every family in America is ultimately touched by some medical problem that regenerative medicine can fix," Kamen said.

Kamen's inventions have included the Segway Human Transporter and the first wearable insulin pump for diabetics.

"If ARMI works, it will overshadow any one of the individual inventions I've worked on," said Kamen, who will be appearing Tuesday at the New Hampshire High Tech Council's Entrepreneur of the Year event at Southern New Hampshire University to talk about the project.

Retiring Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health CEO and President James Weinstein, who has joined the ARMI effort, said the institute's successes could bring widespread benefits.

"It has the potential to alter the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and most importantly, to improve the quality of those lives," said Weinstein, who will continue to practice as an orthopedic surgeon. "Not just the patients, but their family members, who will no longer have to see them suffer and struggle."

Companies signing on

Kamen said it's difficult to predict how many jobs will be created, but he envisions companies sending workers to the Millyard and startup companies springing up.

"If a substantial number of them end up clustering around this Millyard and this area the same way the semiconductor industry clustered around what became known as Silicon Valley, it could be lots and lots of people," Kamen said.

"I think if it goes as I expect, what you're going to see is a couple of giant companies, big pharma companies that everyone's heard of, companies like Merck and Pfizer, that want to be at the table," Kamen said. "Then you're going to see a cottage industry around them of companies that need each other, that have some piece but not the whole piece to get to scale (to production)."

Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation, which describes itself as the world's largest company dedicated to industrial automation and information, has committed $10 million over five years.

"This is literally a life-changing approach and adds a new chapter to medicine," Blake Moret, CEO of Rockwell Automation, said in a statement announcing his company's participation. "Our contribution is to integrate biomanufacturing science with production techniques that increase the capacity, speed, modularity and consistent quality of new tissue and organ production."

Kamen said he thinks ARMI participants will develop a manufacturing process in the Millyard and "they'll actually make stuff there to prove that it's makable." But it's still too early to know whether materials to be put into humans will be made in Manchester or elsewhere.

Potential projects

Kamen said he promised the Department of Defense that within five years ARMI would be self-sustaining financially. The institute is compiling a matrix of project ideas, considering factors such as cost, lowest risk and what would help the most people. No obvious project candidate has emerged.

"We're looking at maybe a couple of parallel paths, quick-start paths which will allow us to demonstrate industrial scale on something quickly over the next couple of years at the same time we start down the road to make some of the really big wins to happen within five years, but it's too early to know which ones are going to be at the top of those lists," Kamen said.

He said a couple of researchers are "on the cusp" of making blood cells, perhaps leading to mass-producing blood and lessening the danger of contaminated blood.

"We're sitting there saying, 'What would prevent us from building essentially a modern version of a bioreactor, some cross between a still or a brewery system ... that could make blood at a scale that we no longer need blood drives?'" Kamen said. "I think that's a possibility."

ARMI is working with the University of New Hampshire-Manchester to set up a program to train workers in biotech research.

"So I think what's going to happen is ARMI will build a little lab that can show that these kinds of things work, and then some group is going to say, 'Well, I can use that to make skin or bone or pieces of cardiac tissue for people or retinas,'" Kamen said.

"And based on their knowledge and their expertise and their individual passion, they'll set up a place around here that will leverage these skill sets and hire the people that are coming out of the university with the skills to run these machines."

mcousineau@unionleader.com

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