London, UK-based Puridify has closed a £2.2m Series A funding round, bringing total external investment to £8m, in what the bioprocessing tech firm said was an expression of confidence in the progress of its proprietary nanofibre purification platform, FibroSelect.
The platform is a single-use alternative to bead resins and porous membranes used in the downstream bioprocessing and the firm says its unique structure has been proven to be more productive at R&D scale than both due to a better permeability and faster mass transfer.
“FibroSelect harnesses the purification power of chromatography in a simpler, more efficient, ready-to-use, single-use unit,” Puridify CEO Oliver Hardick told Biopharma-Reporter.com. “Overcoming the limitations of current product capture chromatography without any additional risk, FibroSelect utilises ligands such as Protein A much more effectively.”
For antibody production, Protein A media is the industry standard for affinity chromatography due to its ability to rapidly bind antibodies while allowing other proteins and impurities to pass through, but the cost of the media is as high as 30% of the total cost of making an mAb.
The FibroSelect could, therefore, save biologics makers money, Hardick said, as “this single-use technology is more robust than packed beds, easier to operate, and won’t require validating before each use in a campaign.”
Commercial appeal
The platform is not yet commercially available, though Hardick told us the latest funding will help attain the firm’s goal of bringing it to market next year. He added there was great interest from industry in the tech.
“We already have partnerships with major drugs manufacturers to evaluate our technology at pilot and industrially relevant scales and are keen to further collaborate with industrial partners who have a desire to implement new purification technologies into their new or existing processes.
“To our knowledge, Puridify is closest to bringing a technology of this type to the bioprocessing industry.”