A syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy com­pa­ny spun out of George Church’s lab is set to tack­le the gene ther­a­py man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck, and it just land­ed $55 mil­lion in a Se­ries A fi­nanc­ing round to do so.

George Church

64x Bio comes out of the Har­vard De­part­ment of Ge­net­ics. CEO Lex Rovn­er and her team — which right now, sits around 10 peo­ple — are look­ing to tack­le a key hur­dle for ma­jor com­pa­nies: man­u­fac­tur­ing cell and gene ther­a­pies.

Rovn­er met Church while get­ting her PhD at Yale, and went on to do a post­doc­tor­al re­search fel­low­ship in his lab, and, when talk­ing to folks in the in­dus­try, found a mas­sive vi­ral vec­tor man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck that wasn’t be­ing talked about.

Af­ter a seed fund­ing round and the com­pa­ny’s launch in 2020, it made some noise in the in­dus­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Covid-19 made bot­tle­neck is­sues more vis­i­ble. There’s a wait­list to get a vec­tor from man­u­fac­tur­ers, and not much of a so­lu­tion to the prob­lem

“In a lot of cas­es, in-house vec­tor man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty is al­ready ex­ceed­ed for even the small­est dis­ease pop­u­la­tions. And once you get in­to the more wide­spread dis­eases, man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty can be off by or­ders of mag­ni­tude,” Rovn­er said in an in­ter­view with End­points News. “It’s very like­ly go­ing to be im­pos­si­ble to out­source that much man­u­fac­tur­ing…It’s re­al­ly no se­cret that this is a prob­lem, that is and will con­tin­ue to lim­it the ther­a­pies for each pa­tient if this is left un­solved.”

Life­force Cap­i­tal led the round, with North­pond Ven­tures, Fu­ture Ven­tures, the for­mer Alde­vron CEO Michael Cham­bers, First Round Cap­i­tal, CEO of Re­cur­sion Chris Gib­son and Al­ix Ven­tures all par­tic­i­pat­ing as well. The funds will go to­ward ad­vanc­ing Vec­torS­e­lect, a plat­form that us­es ma­chine learn­ing to test mil­lions of dif­fer­ent cells for how well virus­es grow in them, mak­ing for a faster, and more ef­fec­tive process.

Once it’s test­ed mil­lions of po­ten­tial cell lines — all si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly — 64x screens for com­bi­na­tions of genes that make for high­ly pro­duc­tive cells. So far, there’s been suc­cess with ade­no-as­so­ci­at­ed virus­es, the most com­mon vec­tor used in gene ther­a­py, and Rovn­er and her team are look­ing to ex­plore oth­er mar­kets too.

“The prob­lem is more fun­da­men­tal than phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture,” she said. “This is a ge­net­ics prob­lem and the so­lu­tions are go­ing to be in tai­lor­ing how a cell in­ter­acts with the vi­ral com­po­nents.”

Church said in a state­ment: “Un­til now, ge­net­ic tai­lor­ing of man­u­fac­tur­ing cells has failed to de­liv­er. Over­com­ing the cel­lu­lar bar­ri­ers to vi­ral pro­duc­tion will re­quire many cel­lu­lar mu­ta­tions in com­bi­na­tion, which means test­ing po­ten­tial­ly tril­lions of mu­tant cells. Ex­ist­ing cell line en­gi­neer­ing and screen­ing tech­nolo­gies have not been up to the chal­lenge.”

64x will “dra­mat­i­cal­ly” grow its em­ploy­ee base, from 10 em­ploy­ees right now to about 50, Rovn­er said. That will start with the ex­pan­sion of its man­age­ment team. It’s al­so go­ing to ex­pand its part­ner­ships with oth­er biotechs, and while the com­pa­ny isn’t ready to an­nounce any­thing just yet, news on that front could be com­ing in the near fu­ture.

Ed­i­tor’s Note: For more news and ex­clu­sive cov­er­age from the man­u­fac­tur­ing beat, sub­scribe to the End­points Man­u­fac­tur­ing week­ly re­port in your read­er pro­file.

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