Avitide, a manufacturer and supplier of molecule-specific biopharmaceutical affinity purification solutions, said today it has raised an undisclosed amount in Series E financing.
Avitide said it will use the proceeds to fund ongoing operations, with the goal of becoming profitable by 2019.
The company focuses on delivering high-yield, high-purity, molecule-specific affinity resins on demand in three months or less. Avitide’s proprietary affinity separation technology is designed to enable its partners to speed up their bioprocess development timelines, reduce their program risk, achieve predictable commercial scalability, and lower their cost of manufacturing for batch and continuous operations.
According to its website, Avitide has 17 partnered programs. The company says its affinity-purification platform has been used successfully to purify biomolecules that include enzymes, antibody-based therapeutics, recombinant vaccines, and gene therapies.
“The Avitide platform is positioned at the convergence of multiple biopharmaceutical manufacturing trends,” Kevin Isett, Avitide’s CEO and cofounder, said in a statement. “There is considerable value in accelerating preclinical and development timelines, purifying only the desired drug substance from product contaminants, and [in] multi-step legacy processes to be more competitive.”
Speaking with GEN in 2014, Isett noted that while Protein A chromatography has been effective for the purification of monoclonal antibodies (despite some drawbacks), “the remaining therapeutic proteins are highly underserved in terms of affinity purification.”
Avitide, Isett said, had successfully separated post-translational modifications (PTMs) such as truncations, deamidations, and pyroglutamate formation, which have posed huge problems for downstream processing due to their close resemblance to product.
Sands Capital Ventures, a new investor, led the financing round, which included participation from returning investors Mithril Capital Management, Polaris Partners, NeoMed Management, OrbiMed Advisors, and Borealis Ventures.
As part of the financing, Ian Ratcliffe, a partner with Sands Capital Ventures, joined Avitide’s Board of Directors. Ratcliffe joined Sands last year after serving as chairman and CEO of Enzymatics.
“Avitide is becoming the industry leader in affinity chromatography, and their bespoke purification solutions enable the development of life-saving biologic drugs,” Ratcliffe stated. “We are excited to help Avitide build a business that provides tremendous value to the biopharmaceutical industry.”
Avitide’s latest financing comes less than a year after the company disclosed in September 2016 that it closed on a series D financing, also undisclosed, and led by Mithril. That round was intended to fund the company’s expansion of its affinity resin discovery platform as well as its resin manufacturing operations, Avitide said at the time.
The company says its high-resolution affinity resins can be designed to select and enrich for improved drug safety, potency, and quality.
In June 2016, Avitide inked a long-term lease for a new headquarters, moving into the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center in Lebanon, NH, a 60,500-square-foot, mixed-use technology incubator that formerly served as Merck & Co.’s GlycoFi facility.
Nearly two weeks ago, Avitide announced two additions to its management team, naming Scott Kennedy as CFO and Karol Lacki as vice president of technology development. Kennedy previously served as CFO of the Life Sciences Solutions division of PerkinElmer, an $800-million-a-year operation, while Lacki previously led the Mathematical Modeling department at Novo Nordisk.
