NEW YORK– New York- and London-based HealthTech venture firm Eckuity has invested in Mobius Biomedical, a development-stage company designing disruptive new technology and processes for lower cost, next-generation biologics manufacturing.
Despite their prevalence and importance to human health, the production of biologics continues to employ predominantly legacy processes and equipment that have fundamentally not changed for decades, resulting in costs of $500M-$1B and 3-4 years in order to build and bring a new production facility online. Estimates indicate that the current global production capacity accounts for less than half of potential demand and the biologics market is projected to grow by 10% yearly over the next 6 years. Additionally, the complexity and growing diversity of biological drug products only serves to exacerbate challenges facing the bio-manufacturing industry.
Mobius Biomedical’s disruptive technology will significantly reduce facility footprint, setup time, and cost, while at the same time providing the flexibility to manufacture a diverse set of biological drug products, as its flexible equipment modules are designed to enable continuous manufacturing of protein-therapeutics, RNA-therapeutics, and gene therapies. Mobius’ technologies will provide unprecedented reductions in manufacturing cost and time to market, while simultaneously improving product yield and purity.
“Mobius Biomedical’s approach is to apply new engineering solutions to well-understood biophysics phenomena in order to increase product yield and purity from a small-footprint process. This approach is designed to significantly reduce manufacturing costs and ameliorate challenges associated with immunogenicity that often restrict the clinical viability of new biological drugs,” said Jason Criscione, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Mobius Biomedical. “We are excited to have Eckuity as an equity partner to work with us to expand our team and advance our alpha phase of development.”
“We are excited about the massive market potential for Mobius, especially the novel solutions for unsolved gene therapy scale up and manufacturing problems. This technology truly enables greater patient accessibility to life-changing therapies through the very significant impact on traditional cost structures,” said Antonio Frasca, PhD, Vice President at Eckuity.
