Bio-Hybrid Steerable Catheter Fabrication and Assembly within the EC ‘BioMeld’ Project - Part 2: Production Plan Achievement

The Biological Transformation in Manufacturing, also called as Biologicalisation in Industry, is a new paradigm fully in line with the requirements of sustainability in industrial production that allows to constructively implement novel and more effectual manufacturing technologies and systems to respond to the demands of the future generations by leveraging on the augmented employment of materials, structures and processes of living nature in production engineering with the objective of sustainable added value. To achieve these notable innovations, the convergence of biology and biotechnology, manufacturing processes and systems, and information and communication technologies is a fundamental prerequisite to provide advanced manufacturing engineering solutions for sustainability and efficiency growth. The first EC call topic on Biological Transformation “Development of technologies and devices for bio-intelligent manufacturing” was issued in June 2021 within the Horizon Europe Programme Call HORIZON-CL4-2021-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-27, and the project proposal “A Modular Framework for Designing and Producing Bio-Hybrid Machines (BHM) - BioMeld“ was submitted and approved in October 2022. This paper focuses on the ‘BioMeld’ project objective to develop a bio-intelligent manufacturing system for producing a bio-hybrid machine consisting of a bio-hybrid vascular catheter as innovative medical device for improved drug delivery in hard-to-access parts of the human body.