With $100m in hand, Kriya set to bring GMP gene therapy plant online

Kriya Therapeutics will use $100 million from a Series B funding to develop its gene therapy manufacturing platforms and says its GMP plant in North Carolina will come online this year.

The Series B financing – led by Patient Square Capital, with participation from new investors Woodline Partners LP, CAM Capital, Hongkou, Alumni Ventures and others – closed earlier this month.

The funding will help support Kriya’s gene therapy platforms and manufacturing infrastructure, which aim to reduce the cost of products through higher process efficiency of AAV production.

Image: iStock/Ankabala

“Proceeds from this financing will be used to further develop our core technology platforms, expand our pipeline and advance our current programs in metabolic disease, ophthalmology and oncology,” CEO Shankar Ramaswamy told BioProcess Insider.

“Our fully integrated model includes two distinct in-house platforms: our computationally enabled proprietary platform for rational vector design (SIRVE) and our innovative high-efficiency manufacturing platform for scalable and low-cost production (STRIPE). These integrated capabilities allow us to rapidly iterate on the design of therapies and improve the efficiency of candidate selection for clinical evaluation.”

The STRIPE (System to Realize Improved Production Efficiency) platform integrates both cell line technology and upstream and downstream processes, which Ramaswamy says helps achieve exponential reductions in production costs at scale.

The tech is being developed at Kriya’s 51,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. While the research-grade production and pilot production suite are currently online, the full cGMP manufacturing infrastructure is set to come online later this year.

“The facility is designed to support the production of material from early research through commercial launch of products, with its own fully integrated process development lab, pilot production suite, and current good manufacturing (cGMP) production capabilities,” said Ramaswamy.

“The cGMP production suites and single-use systems will support the production of multiple products simultaneously at up to 3,000-liter bioreactor scale, with full in-house fill/finish and quality control testing and release capabilities.”