French biotech startup Core Biogenesis recently completed a $10.5M Series A funding round. The funds will be used to build out an industrial scale facility dedicated to producing growth factors and cytokines for the burgeoning cell therapy market and cellular agriculture industry, and to hire additional scientific and technical staff to support the expansion. The funding round was led by XAnge, a Paris-based science and technology venture capital firm. Other investors include Blue Horizon Ventures, a Zurich-based venture capital firm with a focus on protein alternatives and food tech, and Thia Ventures, an investor at the crossroads of biotechnology, nutrition and health, with offices in Geneva, Luxembourg, Belgium and Singapore.
Founded in May 2020, Core Biogenesis has developed a proprietary technology to express recombinant proteins from the seeds of the Camelina sativa oilseed plant. "Our patent-pending protein expression platform is a powerful tool for producing highly bioactive compounds in a completely animal-free and antibiotic-free manner," said CEO and Co-Founder Alexandre Reeber. "We achieve high yield while eliminating the biosafety risk of endotoxin, virus, and prion contamination seen with current mammalian and microbial expression platforms. After harvest, our downstream process is a simple three-step operation that achieves incredibly high purity."
While Core Biogenesis' molecular farming platform can be used to express recombinant growth factors for everything from therapeutics to cultivated meat, their first target is to address the complexity and high costs of next-generation therapeutic modalities such as cell therapies.
As the company builds out the new manufacturing facility, fully functional in Q1 2023, they are also growing their team of scientific and technical experts to a total of 30 employees, with plans for additional expansions in the future.
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