Founded in 2018, SEED Biosciences is developing a new enabling tool to make cell and gene therapy a standard of care. Through a Tech Growth loan, the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT) will fund SEED Biosciences’ sales distribution network expansion in the US to partner with market leaders in lab automation. 

 Treating a patient from cancer is a matter of finding the accurate diseased cell reaction to each drug. All patients are different, and so are the cancer cells. The difficulty remains in finding a personalised cure for every patient. Such personalised medicine is expensive and requires time, making it impossible to scale for every patient. Gene therapy consists in genetically correcting the patient’s cells outside the body before transplanting them back to the patient. There are several bottlenecks in producing a safe and efficient cell product for personalised medicine, the first being the lack of appropriate methods to isolate the single cells. Because gene editing is not perfect, genetically corrected cells are all different. Hundreds of cells are isolated, screened and expanded individually to ensure the therapy is a success.

SEED Biosciences’ objective is to provide scientists with tools that are gentle with cells, affordable, intuitive, and compliant with stringent regulatory issues. In this sense, they developed a Swiss-made award-winning product called DispenCell to enable scientists to isolate single cell lines three times faster and ten times cheaper than existing solutions. The new pipetting robot enables scientists to isolate a single cell as easy as point and click. This tool aims to become the new standard of care. Through their innovation, SEED Biosciences ambitions to become a market leader and a door opener to personalised medicine and help find efficient treatments.

The 12-people team aims to democratise single-cell technology and easily integrate DispenCell into standard laboratory processes. This way, SEED Biosciences seeks to explore the full spectrum of possibilities its technology offers to become a leader in personalised medicine. After 18 months since product launch, the startup counts already twenty recurrent clients in Europe, US and Asia, such as Merck, and Sanofi as well as leading stem cell therapy companies like Century Therapeutics. In addition, the startup recently won the New Product Award at the SLAS2022 conference in Boston for bringing its product to market within 90 days pre-and post-conference.

For SEED Biosciences, the FIT Tech Growth loan will allow the development of its distribution network in the US. The objective is to partner with market leaders in lab automation. The FIT loan will notably be directly involved in the building process and industrialisation of the technology.

 

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