This Stem Cell Manufacturing Startup Just Raised An $80 Million War Chest To Revolutionize Medicine

At the moment, Cellino Biotech, an autonomous cell remedy manufacturing firm, introduced an $80 million Sequence A financing spherical led by Leaps by Bayer together with 8VC, Humboldt Fund, and new buyers together with Felicis Ventures and Khosla Ventures, that would repair an issue holding the biotech trade again. Cellino plans to increase entry to stem cell-based therapies with a aim to construct the primary autonomous human cell foundry in 2025.

To know why this issues, you must have a look at the historical past of drug improvement. Over the past 20 years, drug improvement has moved from making small molecules and chemical compounds, akin to aspirin, that may have an effect on biology to biologicals like proteins, antibodies, and most not too long ago RNA vaccines. The subsequent frontier of improvement is utilizing engineered human cells because the medicine themselves.

The Pioneers of Engineered Stem Cells  

Six years in the past, Leaps by Bayer, the funding arm of the German pharmaceutical big Bayer AG, determined to take a danger on a small startup pioneering what they believed might be transformative expertise for human well being. Leaps by Bayer was one of many buyers that positioned a giant wager on an organization referred to as BlueRock Therapeutics with a $225 million Sequence A financing, which on the time was the most important Sequence A ever made in biotech. 

What was the expertise that impressed Leaps by Bayer to make such a big funding in 2016? It was the flexibility to engineer human stem cells that would deal with many illnesses. Six years later, BlueRock Therapeutics is doing a Section 1 scientific trial to deal with sufferers with superior Parkinson’s illness utilizing stem cell-derived neurons.   

Regardless of this great progress and new firms getting into the market, there may be nonetheless one thing holding again progress. It’s the capacity to reliably manufacture sufficient stem cells to fulfill rising calls for for analysis and trade.

The Way forward for Engineered Cell Remedy  

Think about with the ability to take out your personal cells, referred to as autologous remedy, and engineering them to combat most cancers. Then, placing the cells again into your physique to combat most cancers. One of many advantages of utilizing your personal cells with this remedy is that your immune system is much less more likely to assault them. Or think about with the ability to take someone else’s cells, referred to as allogeneic remedy, and engineering them to carry out a selected operate earlier than injecting them into sufferers. 

Autologous and allogeneic remedy are the way forward for drug improvement. When Leaps by Bayer invested in BlueRock Therapeutics it created the primary disruption of the trade. “Leaps by Bayer had been the pioneers who soar began this trade within the early days,” says Saklayen. 

Now, Leaps by Bayer is main one other disruption of the trade, however this time, it’s centered on clearing a giant bottleneck. “The bottleneck of stem cell engineering occurred as a result of the whole course of was guide and really difficult,” says  Saklayen. “It normally concerned a scientist sitting at a bench these cells by eye after which making choices about which cells had been good or unhealthy. After which the scientists would go in and attempt to take away the unhealthy cells with a pipette tip.”

By means of Cellino, the trade could have reliably manufactured stem cells at scale. Cellino makes use of machine studying, synthetic intelligence (AI), and laser expertise to automate cell remedy manufacturing. Cells are created in a closed cassette format, which permits hundreds of affected person samples to be processed in parallel in a single facility. The tip consequence, these cassettes of human cells, can be utilized to deal with sufferers. 

“Our imaginative and prescient is to construct a Cellino foundry. I envision it can look very like a server room. However every shelf has a cassette of cells being manufactured in an autonomous method,” says Nabiha Saklayen, CEO and co-founder of Cellino.

“Leaps by Bayer’s mission is to put money into paradigm-shifting applied sciences that present long- time period solutions to a few of as we speak’s largest challenges,” mentioned Juergen Eckhardt, MD, Head of Leaps by Bayer. “We imagine that synthetic intelligence-driven manufacturing is the following vital inflection level in the direction of industrializing cell therapies, which undoubtedly are one of many core applied sciences to advance biotech from therapy to prevention or illness reversal. Cellino’s actually transformative expertise to autonomously manufacture stem cell- based mostly therapies matches exactly with our ambition to regenerate misplaced tissue operate for hundreds of thousands of sufferers.”

The potential of stem cell-derived medicines is gigantic with many purposes, together with the therapy of Parkinson’s illness, diabetes, and coronary heart illness. That is the frontier of drug improvement that’s poised to vary the trade.

Thanks to Lana Bandoim for extra analysis and reporting on this article. I’m the founding father of SynBioBeta, and among the firms that I write about, together with Leaps by Bayer, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.