USA – 64x Bio, a San Francisco, CA-based synthetic biology company, closed a $55m Series A financing.
The round was led by Lifeforce Capital, with participation from Northpond Ventures, individual investor Michael Chambers (co-founder and former CEO of Aldevron), Future Ventures, and insider First Round Capital. Chris Gibson (co-founder and CEO of Recursion), Alix Ventures, as well as previous investors, Fifty Years, SV Angel, BoxGroup, and Refactor Capital, also participated in the round. The company intends to use the funds to advance its cell line engineering platform VectorSelect™ to design improved cell lines for a wide range of gene therapies and to grow its employee base and partnership efforts with leading gene therapy companies, through the expansion of additional intellectual property, operations, and business development infrastructure.Led by Alexis “Lex” Rovner, PhD, CEO & co-founder, and George Church, PhD, co-founder, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and founding Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, 64x Bio leverages novel high throughput genome engineering and screening technologies in a design loop with computational tools to develop new ways of generating highly optimized and otherwise unattainable cell lines for the manufacturing of viral vectors, with a specific focus on those used for cell and gene therapies. VectorSelect™ allows 64x to map millions of unique cellular genotypes to their individual vector production phenotypes. In this way, the technology enables high-throughput data generation from massively multiplexed experiments on millions of candidate cell lines simultaneously. 64x then applies computational tools to its CellMap™ database of proprietary mutant data to filter trillions of possible solutions into millions of screenable genetic combinations, further increasing the speed and efficacy of cell line development. Together, this enables discovery of cell lines with improved productivities. The company is currently focused on cell and gene therapy and plans to expand to other markets in the future.19/01/2022
