PAK BioSolutions announced that it has raised $12M from Arboretum Ventures, BroadOak Capital Partners, and other investors to expand commercial and product development efforts for its line of automated continuous manufacturing systems for biologics.
The PAK Pilot System is capable of processing 50-500L of cell culture per day, addressing a major segment of the biopharmaceutical production market. With this new financing, PAK will launch its PAK PD benchtop system for lower volume applications, processing 2-10 liters of cellular material per day, and the PAK K-Series system for large-scale commercial manufacturing of 20,000+ liters of material per day. Creation of these systems has required significant R&D resources to address the specific fluid dynamics of each process scale.
“Our expert team of engineers and scientists have worked tirelessly to create new technologies that will enable bioprocess intensification across a breadth of modalities including mAbs, vaccines, recombinant proteins, viral vectors and others. Today is a very exciting day,” said PAK BioSolutions CEO, Joanna Pezzini.
Founded in 2019 by Joanna Pezzini and Kevin Hill-Byrne (CTO), PAK BioSolutions has experienced rapid growth by helping customers achieve a 90% reduction in operator time, 75% reduction in floorplan footprint, and 60% reduction in capital costs compared to traditional biomanufacturing set-ups.
“We have created an out-of-the-box solution, saving biomanufacturing facilities years of development work,” said PAK Co-Founder and CTO, Kevin Hill-Byrne.
“Bringing these new systems to market will revolutionize the field of automated continuous processing for biologics,” said Dan Kidle, who led the investment on behalf of Arboretum and joined PAK’s Board of Directors. “We strive to support technologies that reduce cost and improve quality and have seen an overwhelming response to PAK’s systems.”
The PAK Pilot System won the Interphex Biotech Innovation Award in 2023 and has continually caught the eye of leaders in the industry. End-to-end continuous manufacturing systems for biopharmaceuticals have been gaining interest and entering the GMP manufacturing space. This demand is driven by over 4X productivity improvements, streamlined operations, and a lower risk profile for manufacture and scale-up. To achieve this, all stages of the purification process are operated simultaneously at steady-state.
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