Wheeler Bio, a biomanufacturing company, recently closed a $14 million Seed financing round co-led by Echo Investment Capital and Alloy Therapeutics, with participation from Floating Point and Presbyterian Health Foundation.
The new funding will be used by Wheeler Bio to expand its team and make its Portable CMCsolution more broadly available, partnering with more preclinical CROs and antibody drug developers. Through parallel integration with preclinical drug discovery groups, Portable CMC provides a faster, easier, and more predictable discovery-to- IND path for drug developers.
“We are delighted to have the continued support of partners and investors as we work to solve the biggest problems associated with tech transfer,” said Dr. Jesse McCool, co-founder and CEO of Wheeler Bio. “With Portable CMC, we can empower preclinical CROs to halve the time to clinical supply for their customers, while significantly de-risking program onboarding for our CDMO partners. This means more medicines reach more patients faster.”
By integrating discovery capabilities with Wheeler Bio’s open source biomanufacturing processes and platforms, preclinical CRO partners can extend their offering beyond drug candidate lead selection, providing drug developers with a clearer path to IND clinical manufacturing. Wheeler’s first partner is Alloy Therapeutics—a Boston-headquartered biotechnology company providing antibody discovery platforms and services to a community of more than 100 developers.
Errik Anderson, founder and CEO of Alloy Therapeutics, said, “We are very enthusiastic about our partnership with Wheeler Bio because its unique approach and high-quality Portable CMC services address the problems our partners face regularly when moving into the IND-enabling phase. Differentiating speed, predictability, and cost benefits amplify our mission to democratize access to foundational drug development capabilities and reduce barriers in the pursuit of making medicine.”
Scientific and operation leadership for the development and implementation of Portable CMC falls to Dr. Stephen Hamilton, chief technical officer of Wheeler Bio, and a veteran of 20 years in industrial R&D and platform engineering. Dr. Hamilton said, “Over the course of my career, I have experienced firsthand the complexities of tech transfer and outsourcing. I am therefore very excited by the unique model that Wheeler Bio is implementing because it provides the next-generation CDMO services that will be critical to the success of emerging biopharma.”
First published on contractpharma.com