Recently, Sino-Biocan announced its Round A financing of nearly RMB 100 million. This round of investment was led by Grand Flight Investment and followed by the existing shareholder Sinovation Ventures.
XIAO Hai, Senior Investment Manager of Sinovation Ventures, said: After Sinovation Ventures’ angel round investment in Sino-Biocan, we are delighted to see that the Company continues to grow at high speed, completes the construction of its production capacity, receives orders from leading domestic and international cell and gene therapy innovative pharmaceutical companies and CDMOs, and starts deliveries in December last year. The management team led by Mr. WEI is well experienced in the industry and has strong execution skills, which are very much in line with the current development of the domestic life science industry. We believe that Sino-Biocan will develop rapidly together with the cell and gene therapy industry, and we very much welcome Grand Flight to participate in the development of the Company to help it grow into a leader in the domestic cell and gene therapy tools industry.
This round of financing will be used to expand the new R&D and design institute (including the R&D center, design center, testing center, data center, customer service center, after-sales service center) and expand the R&D pipeline, build & improve the fully automated equipment, GMP-level disposables, GMP and clinical test-grade liquid production capacity at the Shanghai manufacturing base. The Company will also expand the technical services of the existing products and the development of customized tools & services for various cell & gene-drug R&D companies, and carry out diversified market promotion to meet the recent rapid growth of multi-pipeline differentiated original product development of cell & gene drugs, and the requirements for intelligent automated series of disposable tools for accelerated drug reporting and orderly expansion of production capacity, to meet the market demand for a wide range of GMP-level cell preparation.
With years of R&D of domestic tools in the field of cell and gene therapy, Sino-Bioca the leading domestic company that can provide total solutions for cell preparation tools. Based on the founding team’s in-depth understanding of the R&D, production, and service of the CGT industry, Sino-Biocan is committed to assisting customers to achieve “continuity, closure, disposability, consistency, scalability, automation, modularity and medical device” in cell preparation industrialization, and to promote domestic substitution. The Company has launched a series of cell preparation tools, covering automatic cell separation, culture, washing, programmed dispensing, freezing, and recovery. Besides, the Company provides modularized GMP assembly for each process to meet the specific requirements of different customers with different pipelines, enabling fast, efficient, and differentiated standardized preparation of cells at various GMP levels.
In recent years, cell and gene therapy have made a series of breakthrough achievements in tumor treatment. With the approval of cell therapy drugs in China and the United States, cell therapy has become a hot field nowadays. Thanks to the growing domestic funds and development enterprises, the number of clinical trials continues to increase, and the trial progress continues to advance, which will trigger the demand for upstream preparation tools. The domestic cell preparation tools market is mainly dominated by foreign companies, with high cost, long delivery time, and a time gap in service response, which has become one of the core pain points for the development of the domestic cell and gene therapy industry.
Intending to localize cell preparation tools, Sino-Biocan’s core team has been working on the cell preparation tools for many years. Rooted in the market, the Company has established a mature team focusing on technology research, product design, systematic production, market promotion, and professional service of automated blocking tools for cell preparation. At present, the Company has completed product development and established a production base in Shanghai, with a 5,000-square-meter building, 3,000-square-meter GMP production center, clean quality control, and experimental center. The independently developed star products “Cyclone series (automated cell separation and concentration) and Xiang Yun series (automated cell amplification and culture)” have achieved mass production. At the end of 2021, the Company successfully established an R&D center in Chengdu Tianfu International Bio-town and aims to build it as the core R&D center to meet the rapid development of the Company, as well as one of the important construction and strategic development centers of Sino-Biocan.
WEI Dongbing, the founder of Sino-Biocan, worked in the world’s top 500 enterprises in the field of medical devices for 13 years, and then served as the head of Miltenyi China. He has extensive experience in automated intelligent devices and disposables, especially in the application scenarios and industrialization of different-item multi-disciplinary cellular and genetic drugs. He founded Sino-Biocan many years ago. In 2021, Sino-Biocan was incorporated. It aims to build the Sino-Biocan team into a leading management team with in-depth insight into the needs of cell preparation tools, excellent commercialization ability, and front-line R&D and production management experience of foreign enterprises.
The cell preparation system of Sino-Biocan has completed collaboration with more than 100 cell and gene-drug and development CDMO enterprises, and the team and technology are widely recognized by the leading enterprises in this field. Meanwhile, for the hospital application market with huge demand, the Company has stockpiled diversified products for hospital cell therapy projects and entered the stage of medical device registration certificate filing. The Company’s production system has been approved by ISO and other system certifications. The Company continues to rapidly build up as a cell preparation tool company with medical device production qualifications.