Scottish biotech receives £2.5m to commercialise sustainable manufacturing product

A Scottish bioengineering company has received over £2.5 million in investment to commercialise sustainable manufacturing technology for the pharma industry.

uFraction8 received the funding through a combination of private equity investment and grants. The money will be used to expand the company’s existing facilities, grow its team, scale its technology, and deploy large scale tests with prospective customers.

uFraction8 has developed bio-separation instruments to enable more efficient engineering of bio-based products including mammalian cell-based drugs and medicines. The company’s technology uses microfluidics to enable gentle separation of cell-based products from liquid in which they are grown. uFraction8 states that its technology offers advantages over current market products including extremely low-shear forces which protect the cell integrity during processing and an ability to work with highly viscous media.

This latest investment round was led by Thia Ventures alongside fellow FoodTech investors Blue Horizon and EIT Food, with additional funding from a London-based angel investor. Abel Rossignol and fellow Thia Ventures investor Bart Van Hooland will now join uFraction8’s board. The round was also supported by Scottish Enterprise and global research group Leave a Nest. Additional grant funding was secured from European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) and Innovate UK.

Dr Brian Miller, co-founder of uFraction8 said: “We are excited about this successful investment round and the new partners supporting our mission to produce the best-ever microscale liquid-solid separation systems. Thia Venture and Blue Horizon are ideal partners which share our goals and values and we look forward to closely working with them to achieve long-term success on this journey.

Fellow uFraction8 co-founder, Dr Monika Tomecka, added: “This significant investment, along with the immense and highly successful bio-manufacturing sector track record of our new partners, will enable uFraction8 to grow faster than ever before. Our entire team is excited and ready for the hard work ahead in taking the business to the next level and beyond.

“We remain open to further collaboration opportunities that will support our aim of promoting our cutting-edge technology across global markets.”