Five years after being co-founded by UCL researchers, Ori Biotech has brought its overall funding to $41m.
Ori Biotech, a UK-based cell and gene therapy production spinout of University College London, closed a $30m series A round yesterday led by venture capital firm Northpond Ventures.
The deal was filled out by Octopus Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures and Kindred Capital.
Founded in 2015, Ori Biotech aims to automate and standardise the production of cell and gene therapies (CGTs) in order to limit costs, expand output and improve the quality of drugs.
Ori claims its technique means developers can easily convert pre-clinical drug design programs into commercial manufacturing methods.
Traditionally CGTs were manually engineered from samples extracted from the patient however the industry needs scalable methods to deliver drugs that are not prohibitively expensive.
Ori Biotech was co-founded by its chief scientific officer Farlan Veraitch, a former senior lecturer in UCL’s Department of Biochemical Engineering who specialises in CGT bioprocessing.
Chris Mason, a professor of cell and gene therapy at UCL, co-founded the company with Veraitch.
The series A cash will help prepare the spinout’s technology for the market.
Ori Biotech has now raised $41m altogether, it said. It completed a $9.4m seed round in January 2020 that featured Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures and Kindred Capital along with an unnamed family office and a group of existing angel investors.
Veraitch said: “This new funding will allow us to continue addressing the significant challenges of providing high throughput, high quality and cost-effective CGT manufacturing, and to bring our novel platform into the clinic as quickly as possible to support the important work of our therapeutic developer partners.”
