This Stem Cell Manufacturing Startup Just Raised An $80 Million War Chest To Revolutionize Medicine

Today, Cellino Biotech, an autonomous cell therapy manufacturing company, announced an $80 million Series A financing round led by Leaps by Bayer along with 8VC, Humboldt Fund, and new investors including Felicis Ventures and Khosla Ventures, that could fix a problem holding the biotech industry back. Cellino plans to expand access to stem cell-based therapies with a goal to build the first autonomous human cell foundry in 2025.

To understand why this matters, you have to look at the history of drug development. During the last 20 years, drug development has moved from making small molecules and chemicals, such as aspirin, that can have an impact on biology to biologicals like proteins, antibodies, and most recently RNA vaccines. The next frontier of development is using engineered human cells as the drugs themselves.

The Pioneers of Engineered Stem Cells  

Six years ago, Leaps by Bayer, the investment arm of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG, decided to take a risk on a small startup pioneering what they believed could be transformative technology for human health. Leaps by Bayer was one of the investors that placed a big bet on a company called BlueRock Therapeutics with a $225 million Series A financing, which at the time was the largest Series A ever made in biotech. 

What was the technology that inspired Leaps by Bayer to make such a large investment in 2016? It was the ability to engineer human stem cells that could treat many diseases. Six years later, BlueRock Therapeutics is doing a Phase 1 clinical trial to treat patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease using stem cell-derived neurons.   

Despite this tremendous progress and new companies entering the market, there is still something holding back progress. It is the ability to reliably manufacture enough stem cells to meet rising demands for research and industry.

The Future of Engineered Cell Therapy  

Imagine being able to take out your own cells, called autologous therapy, and engineering them to fight cancer. Then, putting the cells back into your body to fight cancer. One of the benefits of using your own cells with this therapy is that your immune system is less likely to attack them. Or imagine being able to take somebody else’s cells, called allogeneic therapy, and engineering them to perform a particular function before injecting them into patients. 

Autologous and allogeneic therapy are the future of drug development. When Leaps by Bayer invested in BlueRock Therapeutics it created the first disruption of the industry. “Leaps by Bayer were the pioneers who jump started this industry in the early days,” says Saklayen. 

Now, Leaps by Bayer is leading another disruption of the industry, but this time, it is focused on clearing a big bottleneck. “The bottleneck of stem cell engineering happened because the entire process was manual and very complicated,” says  Saklayen. “It usually involved a scientist sitting at a bench looking at these cells by eye and then making decisions about which cells were good or bad. And then the scientists would go in and try to remove the bad cells with a pipette tip.”

Through Cellino, the industry will have reliably manufactured stem cells at scale. Cellino uses machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and laser technology to automate cell therapy manufacturing. Cells are created in a closed cassette format, which allows thousands of patient samples to be processed in parallel in a single facility. The end result, these cassettes of human cells, can be used to treat patients. 

“Our vision is to build a Cellino foundry. I envision it will look much like a server room. But each shelf has a cassette of cells being manufactured in an autonomous manner,” says Nabiha Saklayen, CEO and co-founder of Cellino.

“Leaps by Bayer’s mission is to invest in paradigm-shifting technologies that provide long- term answers to some of today’s biggest challenges,” said Juergen Eckhardt, MD, Head of Leaps by Bayer. “We believe that artificial intelligence-driven manufacturing is the next important inflection point towards industrializing cell therapies, which undoubtedly are one of the core technologies to advance biotech from treatment to prevention or disease reversal. Cellino’s truly transformative technology to autonomously manufacture stem cell- based therapies fits precisely with our ambition to regenerate lost tissue function for millions of patients.”

The potential of stem cell-derived medicines is enormous with many applications, including the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and heart disease. This is the frontier of drug development that is poised to change the industry.

Thank you to Lana Bandoim for additional research and reporting in this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies that I write about, including Leaps by Bayer, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.