Ori Biotech reported the successful close of a $30 million Series A financing round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $41 million. The new funding will be used to help take Ori’s manufacturing platform to the market. The Ori platform delivers scalable solutions to flexibly address the critical clinical and commercial manufacturing needs of cell and gene therapy (CGT) developers, according to Jason C. Foster, company CEO.
“Closing a significant Series A round, during these uncertain times, further validates Ori’s disruptive approach to fully automating cell and gene therapy manufacturing to increase throughput, improve quality, and decrease costs,” he said. “We are excited to work with our top tier investors and development partners to bring our platform to market as fast as possible to achieve our mission of enabling patient access to life-saving cell and gene therapies.”
Revolutionary scientific breakthroughs are currently being made in CGT to treat all types of disease ranging from cancer to rare genetic diseases utilizing cutting edge technologies like CAR-T and CRISPR gene editing. The first products using these technologies have come to market and currently there are more than 1,500 clinical trials underway to bring even more treatments to the patients who need them, noted Farlan Veraitch, PhD, the company’s co-founder and CSO.
“The problem is that these amazing treatments are very expensive and, for now, can only be produced in relatively small volumes,” he explained. “For example, the first approved CAR-T products can offer a cure to many refractory leukemia patients but with limited production capacity and a price of ~$500,000 per patient, not very many patients are getting access to them. With 10–20 new CGTs predicted to be approved by the FDA every year after 2025, this unfortunate situation is only going to get worse.”
Veraitch pointed out that Ori Biotech has developed a proprietary, flexible manufacturing platform that closes, automates, and standardizes cell and gene therapy manufacturing.
“[Our technology allows] therapeutics developers to bring their products all the way from preclinical process development to commercial scale manufacturing, with the promise of cutting time to market, increasing throughput, improving quality and decreasing production costs,” he said.
The Series A investor syndicate was led by Northpond Ventures and Octopus Ventures. Northpond and Octopus invested alongside support from Ori’s existing institutional investors, Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures, and Kindred Capital.
