French biotech armed with Series A looks to build out manufacturing facility for plant-based protein tech – Endpoints News

Us­ing plant-based sup­ply to man­u­fac­ture vac­cines and oth­er phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ma­te­ri­als has be­come more preva­lent in the biotech space, but one French biotech is look­ing to ap­ply it to the cell ther­a­py mar­ket.

Core Bio­gen­e­sis, based in Stras­bourg, France, us­es a plant-based bio­pro­duc­tion plat­form to pro­duce pro­teins. Ac­cord­ing to CEO Alexan­dre Reeber, the com­pa­ny us­es cameli­na, oth­er­wise known as wild flax tra­di­tion­al­ly used in gas­tron­o­my, to man­u­fac­ture pro­teins from the seeds of the plant. Core has se­cured $10.5 mil­lion in a Se­ries A to push its tech for­ward.

The com­pa­ny pro­duces its pro­teins in the seeds of the plants and har­vests them us­ing ba­sic agri­cul­tur­al meth­ods. Once in­side the seeds, re­searchers ex­tract the mol­e­cules and then pu­ri­fy them with their tech­nol­o­gy, leav­ing them with raw ma­te­ri­als that can then be ap­plied to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny has set its sights on pro­vid­ing pa­tients with cell ther­a­py.

Chouaib Mezia­di

Ac­cord­ing to Reeber, the idea for the com­pa­ny came dur­ing an in­tern­ship at a Stras­bourg hos­pi­tal’s on­col­o­gy unit. He first en­coun­tered cell ther­a­py at the unit but found it very ex­pen­sive to man­u­fac­ture. Two years lat­er in 2020, the oth­er co-founder, Chouaib Mezia­di, was do­ing a post-doc on plant epi­ge­net­ics where he iden­ti­fied the com­bi­na­tion of three key genes in­volved in the de­fense mech­a­nisms of the plant. The two even­tu­al­ly formed the com­pa­ny lat­er that year.

“This key in­no­va­tion will al­low us to mass pro­duce re­com­bi­nant pro­teins, and with mass pro­duc­tion al­so comes a dras­tic re­duc­tion in the price of the process,” Reeber said in an in­ter­view with End­points News.

Reeber said while the com­pa­ny pre­vi­ous­ly has net­ted some seed in­vest­ment of around $3 mil­lion, their Se­ries A now will go to­wards scal­ing up their man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties and open­ing a new fa­cil­i­ty. The round al­so gives the com­pa­ny a run­way of two years, but Reeber said the com­pa­ny will be look­ing at an­oth­er round of fi­nanc­ing to ac­cel­er­ate com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

For their new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty, which is still un­der con­struc­tion, Reeber said it is plan­ning to come on­line some­time in Q1 or Q2 next year. Around 600 square me­ters of the fa­cil­i­ty are ded­i­cat­ed to grow­ing the plants in growth cham­bers with an­oth­er 100 square me­ters ded­i­cat­ed to ex­trac­tion in pu­rifi­ca­tion. The lo­ca­tion of the fa­cil­i­ty will be in the city cen­ter of Stras­bourg.

Reeber al­so has a team of 30 peo­ple work­ing at the fa­cil­i­ty and will look to hire a di­rec­tor of man­u­fac­tur­ing.

While Reeber and Core Bio­gen­e­sis are fo­cused on cell ther­a­py, he is join­ing oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ing star­tups that are us­ing nov­el tech­niques in the in­dus­try.

Ac­cord­ing to Reeber, sev­er­al fac­tors set the com­pa­ny from the rest of the pack. Core promis­es to of­fer a more cost-ef­fi­cient prod­uct by us­ing cameli­na, which he said can guar­an­tee a bioac­tive and sta­ble sup­ply chain, but it al­so cuts down on us­ing an­i­mal-de­rived prod­ucts.

“And so in­her­ent to the use of plants we are com­plete­ly an­i­mal-ori­gin free and bio-risk free with ze­ro risk of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the most an­noy­ing con­t­a­m­i­nants that are usu­al­ly seen in­side of gene ther­a­py,” he said.

Reeber al­so states that his prod­uct is heav­i­ly sus­tain­able. With most com­pa­nies us­ing biore­ac­tor-based fer­men­ta­tion, the com­pa­ny’s method is car­bon neg­a­tive and pro­duces far few­er pol­lu­tants than what can be found by their com­peti­tors in the space.

As far as cus­tomers and part­ners are con­cerned, Reeber said that they have start­ed with a few se­lect part­ners and ear­ly adopters of their tech­nol­o­gy but now are open for more as they head to­ward full com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

The fund­ing round was led by XAnge, with oth­er in­vestors in­clud­ing Blue Hori­zon Ven­tures and Thia Ven­tures.