Biotech Limula secures $6.8M for gene therapy

Limula has raised a $6.8M seed round to lower costs of life-saving cell and gene therapy products.

The company is currently onboarding selected cell therapy developers to run pilots. The money raised will be used to advance software development.

The oversubscribed seed round was led by LifeX Ventures, with participation from Verve Ventures, Zühlke Ventures, Oxford Seed Fund, Lichtsteiner Foundation, W.A. de Vigier Foundation, the founders and angel investors.

Founded in 2020, the company focuses on making ‘ex vivo’ manipulation of cells more affordable. The founders witnessed that outdated manufacturing methods were a speed bump to the adoption of Cell and Gene Therapy products – like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells. Combining breakthrough discoveries in genetic engineering and medicine led to a revolution in medicine, but boosting the patients’ own cells to produce a dose in a laboratory still requires too many manual steps. 

Highly skilled labour and sterile infrastructures represent the majority of the costs of therapy, leading to a price tag of $500,000 or more per dose. As a result, these treatments are inaccessible for a majority of eligible patients.

The technology can be used by cell therapy providers in their transition from pre-clinical evaluation to clinical trials, and later commercial scale manufacturing of clinical-grade cell products.

After completing an initial proof of concept, the company launched a program to provide selected industry and academic partners access to the innovative platform ahead of its commercial launch. With the aim to broaden the scope of applications, Limula has signed partnerships with several research centres including San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan, Italy.

Luc Henry, co-founder and CEO of Limula said: "Our team is driven by the ambitious goal of developing tools that are based on a fundamentally novel way of manipulating cells outside of the body. Our technology supports manufacturing workflows that are impossible to automate with existing tools. We believe automation is the only route to scalability and digital traceability. These two aspects are keys unlocking the full potential of Cell and Gene Therapy, making them accessible to the many, not just the few”.