Silvia Bio raises £3M in seed funding
Silvia Bio, a University of Sheffield biotechnology spinout, has raised £3 million in seed funding led by Northern Gritstone. Additional investors include the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (managed by Future Planet Capital), Wren Capital, and angel investors.
Silvia Bio helps pharmaceutical companies make medicines more efficiently using living cells.
Modern medicine is sometimes manufactured using living mammalian cells that act as biological factories producing ingredients needed to make the medicine. Sometimes the cells do not perform properly by producing too little product, making manufacturing expensive and slow.
A report by Tufts University found that each day a medicine is delayed can represent around £500,000 in lost sales for biopharmaceutical companies, while patients wait longer for potentially important treatments.
Silvia Bio’s platform combats this by helping pharmaceutical companies identify problems in the cells used to manufacture medicines, improve cell performance by finding biological factors limiting production, and increasing yields and consistency.
Silvia Bio then uses those findings to formulate licensable bioreactor-compatible additives designed to improve product yield and critical quality attributes.
The startup was co-founded by Ed Curry, Melinda Pohle, Professor Adam Brown, and Professor David James, building on more than 20 years of biomanufacturing research at the University of Sheffield.
The funding will support Silvia Bio as it moves from the University of Sheffield into dedicated laboratory space at the Innovation Centre in Sheffield. The company plans to triple its headcount, automate processes currently done manually, increase its commercial capacity, and accelerate the development of new licensable products.
The company will reportedly use the fresh capital to expand its international reach as it works towards becoming a leading global provider of biomanufacturing solutions.
Ed Curry, CEO and Co-founder of Silvia Bio, said: “ Our platform gives biopharmaceutical companies a much clearer view of why their cells are underperforming and, crucially, provides practical solutions that can be introduced directly into the manufacturing process.”
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