The financing round was led by Bpifrance Large Venture, and it was joined by US investment firm, Leonard Green & Partners, pharma giant, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), and European venture capital team, XAnge.
In conjunction with the financing, independent board member Frederic Desdouits, PhD, has been appointed CEO of TreeFrog Therapeutics, while co-founder, Kevin Alessandri, PhD, will relocate in early 2022 to Boston, to lead a newly created US subsidiary.
Through overcoming current critical manufacturing issues, the privately held Bordeaux-based company is looking to ensure more patients can access cell therapies through mass production.
Founded in 2018, TreeFrog Therapeutics was one of the winners of the 2020 Galien Medstartup Awards, which recognize Franco-American collaborations in the fields of biotech, pharma, medical technologies, and digital health. The biotech has developed C-Stem, a technology platform providing an end to end 3D scalable solution that is designed to dramatically reduce treatment costs.
“C-Stem offers unprecedented scale and quality, enabling the exponential growth of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) and their differentiation into ready-to-transplant microtissues in industrial bioreactors,” according to the startup.
Desdouits, the biotech’s newly appointed CEO, said the Series B financing allows TreeFrog Therapeutics to dramatically increase tis capacities and investments in R&D, to consolidate a pipeline of iPS-derived cell therapies targeting neurodegeneration, cardiac and metabolic disorders, as well as blood and immune-related diseases.