PIRACICABA, Brazil, Sept. 05, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Biotimize, a growth-stage functional biotechnology-as-a-service (BaaS) company with a mission to transform lives through biotechnology, today announced the opening of a series -A $30 million funding round announced. The investment will enable Biotimize to build the first biological CDMO in Brazil and become the first end-to-end biological CDMO in South America.
Brazilian universities, startups and medium-sized companies face enormous challenges in the development of biologically active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). These difficulties are reflected in the small number of biopharmaceutical products brought to market through 100% Brazilian research, a suboptimal biological production capacity (only 2.19% of the world production capacity is in South America), the small number of facilities with active GMP certification, and the very high cost of importing organic products ($1.3 billion in 2015). Among many other causes, this is mainly due to the lack of Brazilian biological CDMOs, although there are more than 500 worldwide.
Recent efforts have attempted to change Brazil’s historically daunting biopharmaceutical scenario. The Brazilian government has enacted several industrial incentives and legislation Brazilian Health Authority also enforces strict adherence to ICH guidelines. “The impact of building the CDMO goes well beyond finance. Biotimize will help lay the foundation for a growing scientific community that currently has no structure for development or GMP production,” says Fernando Barbosa, CEO of Biotimize .
A 32,000 square foot property was donated to Biotimize by the City of Piracicaba, and Biotimize is negotiating partnerships with world-renowned equipment suppliers, API characterization centers and GMP training organizations. “The CDMO will have independent upstream mammalian cell culture suites focused on the production of recombinant proteins, such as monoclonal…
