Leading the fundraising effort was Novalis Biotech Acceleration and Participatie Maatschappij Vlaanderen (PMV).
“The Series A will enable us to complete our GMP compliant production line, which will go live by the end of 2021,” explained Prof Dr Thomas De Beer, RheaVita CEO.
The company, established in 2018, would not disclose the total amount it has raised to date, however.
Today, almost 50% of FDA and EMA approved biopharma products are freeze-dried to enable stable product distribution and shelf life without the need for expensive cold chain, said RheaVita. It has developed was it says is the world’s first end-to-end continuous freeze-drying solution to address biopharma product development, manufacturing, and supply needs in order to efficiently reach patients.
Advantages over traditional freeze-drying process
Compared to the traditional freeze-drying process, its approach has several advantages, including very fast product and process development with limited experimental efforts, no scale-up issues, reducing cycle times, lower production costs, less clean room space requirements, improving quality assurance and improved and uniform product quality and process uniformity, said the chief executive.
The technology, he said, enables both centralized large volume and decentralized low-volume-high-value product manufacturing and is suited for innovative biological therapies, such as gene therapy, RNA based therapies, antibodies, vaccines, and to produce precision medicines and drug products for rare diseases.
Feasibility testing
What evidence is there to back up RheaVita’s claims about its technology?