Northern Gritstone invests into University of Sheffield spinout Silvia Bio
The £3 million Seed round has a ‘golden’ investor syndicate including Parkwalk’s NUPF, the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (managed by Future Planet Capital) and Wren Capital
Silvia Bio a University of Sheffield biotechnology spinout helping biopharmaceutical companies make complex medicines faster, more reliably and at lower cost, has raised £3 million in Seed funding. Northern Gritstone led the round, with additional investment from the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (managed by Future Planet Capital), Wren Capital and angel investors.
More than half of new biological medicines are now considered difficult to manufacture. Many critical therapeutics such as antibodies and gene therapies rely on using living mammalian cells as a factory to produce them. As those molecules become more complex, the cells can struggle to manufacture them consistently, creating low yields, variable quality and costly delays. For biopharmaceutical companies, each day a medicine is delayed can represent around £500,000 in lost sales, while patients wait longer for potentially important treatments.
Silvia Bio addresses this challenge through an integrated platform that identifies the biological bottlenecks limiting cell performance and develops precision media additives to overcome them. Its proprietary cell-profiling technology creates a detailed fingerprint of how cells behave during manufacturing, providing clear, relevant insight into why a manufacturing process is underperforming. Silvia Bio then uses those findings to formulate licensable bioreactor-compatible additives designed to improve product yield and critical quality attributes.
Silvia Bio was founded by Ed Curry, Melinda Pohle, Professor Adam Brown, and Professor David James, building on more than 20 years of biomanufacturing research at the University of Sheffield. The funding will support Silvia Bio as it moves from the University of Sheffield into dedicated laboratory space at the Innovation Centre in Sheffield. It will enable the company to triple its headcount, automate processes currently done manually, increase its commercial capacity, and accelerate the development of new licensable products. Having already validated its platform with industrial partners, the company will use the fresh capital to expand its international reach as it works towards becoming a leading global provider of biomanufacturing solutions.
Ed Curry, CEO and Co-founder of Silvia Bio, said: “The medicines being developed today have the potential to transform patients’ lives, but many are becoming harder and more expensive to manufacture. Our platform gives biopharmaceutical companies a much clearer view of why their cells are underperforming and, crucially, provides practical solutions that can be introduced directly into the manufacturing process. This investment will allow us to automate and scale our technology, grow our team and help more companies bring complex medicines to patients faster.”
Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone, said: “Silvia Bio is tackling a critical bottleneck in the development of next-generation medicines. Its technology combines deep scientific insight with a clear commercial proposition: helping manufacturers improve yields, reduce delays and make complex biologics more predictable to produce. Building on world-class research from the University of Sheffield and the support of our venture builder programme, NG Studios, Ed, Melinda and the team have made impressive progress, and we are delighted to support their next phase of growth.”