University of Sheffield spinout company raises £3 million to accelerate next-generation biomanufacturing
A University of Sheffield spinout company is set to help biopharmaceutical companies make complex medicines faster, more reliably and at lower cost, after raising £3 million in Seed funding.
- University of Sheffield spinout company Silvia Bio has raised £3 million in Seed funding
- Building on 20 years of biomanufacturing research at Sheffield, the spinout’s new technology could help to speed up the production of new medicines, such as gene therapies
- Silvia Bio’s platform can quickly identify biomanufacturing bottlenecks and develop solutions to overcome them
A University of Sheffield spinout company is set to help biopharmaceutical companies make complex medicines faster, more reliably and at lower cost, after raising £3 million in Seed funding.
Silvia Bio, founded by Ed Curry, Melinda Pohle, Professor Adam Brown, and Professor David James, builds on more than 20 years of biomanufacturing research at the University. The company has developed a new platform to accelerate biomanufacturing by pinpointing bottlenecks and identifying solutions.
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 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.
The funding round, led by Northern Gritstone, an investment company supporting science and technology startups in the North of England, 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, will support Silvia Bio as it moves from the University of Sheffield into dedicated laboratory space at the Innovation Centre in Sheffield.
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.”
Professor Ashutosh Tiwari, Deputy Vice-President for Innovation at the University of Sheffield, said: “Silvia Bio is an example of the innovation ecosystem we have here at the University of Sheffield and how this can grow businesses, attract investment and develop new technologies that can make a real impact in industry and people’s lives. I’m looking forward to seeing the company grow from this investment and their technology helping to speed up the development of new medicines.”
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.”
