Sphere Fluidics closes $40m funding round
The round was led by France-based, Sofinnova Partners, and San Francisco’s Redmile Group, who co-invested on equal terms.
In conjunction with the financing, Sofinnova’s Tom Burt and Redmile Group’s Rob Faulkner will join the board of the UK firm.
“We will use the funding to grow our sales force and service and support internationally. The funds will also enable development of new products and applications for our proprietary Cyto-Mine single cell analysis system and other new products,” Dr Frank Craig, CEO, Sphere Fluidics, told us.
The company will also expand its product research and development programs.
Cell line, cell therapy development
In 2018, Sphere Fluidics launched Cyto-Mine as its flagship product for the pharmaceutical and cell research industries market, to accelerate biopharmaceutical discovery and development.
To date, the technology has been purchased by an international customer base including global pharmaceutical companies, biotech, CDMOs, and leading research institutions, reported the UK developer.
The CEO outlined how Cyto-Mine is designed to process millions of samples per day, assessing and isolating rare or valuable cell variants or biological products, to simplify and improve throughput across antibody discovery, cell line development and cell therapy development.
The system, he added, integrates isolation, selective screening, sorting, and imaging into a single automated platform to streamline workflows, reduce costs, improve throughput and enable high-value cells to be captured in a single run.
“Earlier this year, we announced the Cyto-Mine’s new simplified design, enabling users to access additional functionalities through a more advanced and reliable system, to further streamline drug discovery workflows. The funding raised will support the technology’s further applications into new research areas such as cell therapy, synthetic biology and genome editing, in addition to ongoing enhancements of the platform’s capabilities and performance,” reported Craig.
