Ori Biotech Raises €88M to Automate Cell Therapy Manufacture
Ori Biotech, based in the United Kingdom, has secured €88 million ($100 million) in its Series B funding to help alleviate the cell therapy manufacturing bottleneck through automation and standardized data collection.
Novalis LifeSciences, a renowned US investment company, led the round, which was 40 % oversubscribed. The Chimera Abu Dhabi financier, and Puhua Capital – a Chinese investor, have joined an existing syndicate that includes Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures, and others. Ori Biotech plans to use the funds to expand its recruitment efforts dedicated to commercializing its cell therapy manufacturing technology and launching its innovative CGT manufacturing platform. The company is also launching its Lightspeed Early Access Program (LEAP), allowing select partners to gain pre-launch access to the Ori platform in 2022.
Jason Foster, Ori Biotech’s CEO stated:
“Our mission as a company is to enable widespread patient access to life saving cell and gene therapies. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving this is cell and gene therapy manufacturing processes that are too expensive, too highly variable and too low throughput. Our team is focused on the urgent need to enhance the ability of cell and gene therapy developers, CDMOs and Academic Medical Centers to deliver these therapies to as many patients as possible as quickly as possible.”
Barry Clare, Chairman of the Board added:
“The significant experience and capital that our investors bring to Ori will help the company rapidly transition through the launch of our early access partnerships in 2022 to full commercialization in 2023 in order to support new and existing partners in all phases of development.”
The Ori Biotech platform is a proprietary, full stack manufacturing system that closes, automates, digitizes and standardizes CGT manufacturing. It could enable drug developers, contract manufacturers and academic researchers to seamlessly transition from pre-clinical process discovery through clinical trials to commercial scale. The novel Ori platform’s key advantage would be to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput and reproducibility, while improving quality and decreasing costs through the combination proprietary hardware, software, data and analytical tools.
In the last two years, the cell and gene therapy industries have seen record levels of venture capital investment. However, because the procedure necessitates massive facilities and a high amount of manual labor, these sophisticated medicines remain difficult and expensive to create. Furthermore, the cultivation of fragile human cells usually provides variable outcomes.
Ori Biotech’s goal is to create automated mini factories’ reducing the amount of space and staff needed in the cell therapy production process by up to 90%. The technology combines technical and biological expertise with a data-gathering system to provide consistent monitoring of the process.
Paul Meister, partner at Novalis LifeSciences, who will be joining the Ori Board of Director commented:
“We view Ori Biotech as the best-in-class solution to solve many of the significant challenges now facing CGT researchers and developers. We think Ori is well positioned, and are pleased to partner with their industry leading management team.”
About Ori Biotech
Ori is a London-and New Jersey-based manufacturing technology company pioneering flexible process discovery with seamless translation and scalable commercialization of cell and gene therapies. Ori has developed a proprietary, full stack manufacturing platform that closes, automates and standardizes CGT manufacturing allowing therapeutics developers to develop and bring their products to market at commercial scale. The promise of the innovative Ori platform is to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput, improve quality and decrease costs by combining proprietary hardware, software, data and analytics.
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