For the fourth time in as many weeks, a com­pa­ny fo­cused on portable drug man­u­fac­tur­ing is mak­ing noise.

This time, Nut­crack­er Ther­a­peu­tics has brought in $167 mil­lion in a Se­ries C round led by ARCH Ven­ture Part­ners. The com­pa­ny will use the fi­nanc­ing to help ad­vance its pipelines of mR­NA med­i­cines for on­col­o­gy, in ad­di­tion to re­fin­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nol­o­gy that spurred the biotech’s launch. Nut­crack­er will al­so grow its team, par­tic­u­lar­ly on the med­ical side of things, as it has re­cent­ly round­ed out its ex­ec­u­tive team.

Ge­off Nos­rati

Chief busi­ness of­fi­cer Ge­off Nos­rati said in a call with End­points News that what makes Nut­crack­er’s plat­form unique from oth­ers who oc­cu­py a sim­i­lar space is that it deals with more than just man­u­fac­tur­ing. Nut­crack­er says it de­vel­ops new drugs in-house, and it has de­vel­oped its own de­liv­ery sys­tem, which it calls Nut­shells, to get the RNA to its tar­get.

Nut­crack­er’s man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­form com­bines RNA bio­chem­istry with mi­cro flu­idic en­gi­neer­ing, semi­con­duc­tor-line biochips and nanopar­ti­cle de­liv­ery tech. In a sin­gle man­u­fac­tur­ing unit, its de­vice can car­ry out DNA tem­plate ex­pan­sion, pro­duce drug sub­stance, and for­mu­late the drug prod­uct. The team hopes to speed up the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, and make scal­ing eas­i­er.  Nut­crack­er switch­es be­tween drugs by swap­ping out a nanochip.

What hasn’t been broad­cast yet is the com­pa­ny’s push to­ward its own can­cer drugs us­ing mR­NA. That is some­thing Nut­crack­er hopes to change soon, Nos­rati said.

“We’re re­al­ly de­vel­op­ing ag­gres­sive­ly our whol­ly-owned pipeline of on­col­o­gy ther­a­peu­tics, and look­ing to ex­pand that even fur­ther, both on our own and through part­ner­ships with biotechs,” he said. “It’s a pret­ty sub­stan­tial change in our mes­sag­ing, and we’ve been pret­ty qui­et so far.”

Bob Nelsen

The com­pa­ny, which is based in Cal­i­for­nia’s Bay Area, was found­ed in 2019, be­fore Covid-19 made mR­NA a house­hold name. CEO Ig­or Khan­dros brought Mad­hu Bal­achan­dran out of re­tire­ment to be­come the COO, and the ef­forts sparked the in­ter­est of Bob Nelsen, who led the way for the com­pa­ny’s $60 mil­lion in fundrais­ing back in 2020.

Nut­crack­er’s join­ing a slew of com­pa­nies look­ing to shake up the in­dus­try’s ap­proach to build­ing com­plex bi­o­log­ic ther­a­pies.

A month ago, BioN­Tech held a press con­fer­ence ad­dress­ing its af­ford­able man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties, dubbed the BioN­Tain­er, that it will de­liv­er to Sene­gal and Rwan­da as a part of its ef­forts to im­prove the lack of man­u­fac­tur­ing on the con­ti­nent. Its pri­ma­ry fo­cus will be on Covid-19, but the com­pa­ny has said it plans to piv­ot to malar­ia drugs when the time is right.

Then Cure­Vac came out and an­nounced that it was spin­ning out a ful­ly-owned com­pa­ny specif­i­cal­ly for its mR­NA print­er, a portable man­u­fac­tur­ing de­vice that, ide­al­ly, could be dropped off at hos­pi­tals around the world. A week lat­er, Mytide Ther­a­peu­tics an­nounced a $7 mil­lion Se­ries A to de­vel­op a sim­i­lar piece of tech­nol­o­gy that spe­cial­izes in pep­tide man­u­fac­tur­ing. That com­pa­ny has land­ed in­vest­ment from Al­loy Ther­a­peu­tics.

Nut­crack­er has al­so added Michael Bigham, the for­mer CEO of Paratek Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, to its board of di­rec­tors. He will bring more than 30 years of lead­er­ship to the team.

“RNA has unique qual­i­ties as a ther­a­peu­tic modal­i­ty and could prove to be a first-line tool for many dis­eases,” he said in a state­ment. “Nut­crack­er Ther­a­peu­tics is well-po­si­tioned to de­vel­op RNA ther­a­peu­tics in a scal­able and ef­fi­cient man­ner with its in­no­v­a­tive plat­form.”

A lack of diversity in clinical trials has persisted despite decades of initiatives to try to turn the tide.

In a recent review of 17 years of clinical trials, drugmaker GSK found that there were some mismatches between the demographics of its US-based trials and how prevalent diseases were in those populations.

The results, the company says, will help GSK and others design studies that better represent epidemiological rates within races and ethnicities.

German mRNA player BioNTech opened the doors to a new manufacturing facility on Thursday, this one just about 75 miles north of its headquarters in Mainz, Germany.

BioNTech announced on Thursday that it has completed the construction of its first plasmid DNA manufacturing facility in Marburg, Germany. The facility will produce materials for mRNA-based vaccines and therapies along with cell therapies.