64x Bio bags $55m in funding to drive cell production tech

64x Bio has received $55 million in a series A round of fundraising to fund the expansion of its VectorSelect platform.

According to 64x Bio, a synthetic cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturer founded in 2020 and focused on addressing CGT manufacturing issues exposed by the Coronavirus pandemic, its cell line engineering technology, VectorSector has the potential to revolutionize the economics and accessibility of gene therapy.

Led by Lifeforce Capital, with contribution from Northpond Ventures, Future Ventures and others , the Series A financing hopes to advance it’s the VectorSelect platform and grow 64x Bio’s employee base and partnership activity with other gene therapy companies.

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“This Series A financing will allow us to take VectorSelect to the next level and grow our business infrastructure to establish more partnerships,” said Alexis Rovner, CEO 64x Bio.

“With the support of our incredible investors and scientific team, we aim to become the leading developer of vector manufacturing cell lines, to revolutionize the economics of gene therapy and the reach of these lifesaving medicines to patients.”

Sander Duncan, general partner at Lifeforce Capital said the current vector manufacturing cell lines in the industry suffer from poor yield and quality, which ultimately impacts drug development, whereas “64x’s technology platform VectorSelect has the potential to reduce cost and increase manufacturing capacity by orders of magnitude.”

The VectorSelect platform uses DNA library synthesis, sequencing, and computational approaches to surge experimental throughput and create cell lines with improved productivities. The genetic barcoding method connects information on viral vector productivity and sends it back to the parent cell, creating millions of candidate production cell lines simultaneously.

Each experiment using this platform produces a large amount of genetic data, which 64x Bio then filters trillions of potential solutions into millions of screen-able genetic combinations, increasing the time and efficacy of cell line discovery.