Oxford Genetics secures investment; expands UK facility and eyes US market
The investment comes from existing investor Mercia Technologies PLC, and Invesco Perpetual and will help the bioprocessing support firm expand its global presence and increase its DNA, protein, viral and cell line service offerings.
The UK extension adds another floor in its building in Oxford which will be fitted out to increase capacity across the firm’s entire service offering, allowing the segregation of material flow and the isolation of individual projects, a spokesperson from Oxford Genetics told us.
“This will allow us to continue to exceed regulatory requirements and provide quality assurance for our clients. We will also add more analytical, purification and process development equipment, for instance small scale bioreactors, to enable us to fully support our clients from research up to the point of GMP bioproduction.”
The 6,000 sq ft extension is expected to be ready by November, and will include cell line engineering capabilities, viral vector production and purification suites, high-throughput robotic screening systems and process development facilities.
The US expansion, meanwhile, will see the firm open an office in Boston to target the large US market.
“A US office is integral because it is the single largest market for our technologies and services,” we were told. “There has been a significant increase in the demand for our viral expression systems and cell line development for virus production.”
The firm, founded in 2011, licenses its technology platforms on a non-exclusive basis to all biopharma and according to the spokesperson has had “tremendous interest” from firms looking for bioproduction optimisation solutions.
“We have already begun to sign licenses and collaboration deals. The latter agreements are particularly interesting since they are allowing our collaborators accelerated access to some of our virus production platform technologies, which will fully mature over the next 18 months.”
In the past year, Oxford Genetics has benefitted from several funding projects including a £1.6m and £1m, both from Innovate UK, to explore computational and synthetic biology approaches for optimising mammalian biomanufacturing processes, and to overcome the inefficient and costly scale-up of viral vector production, respectively.
