Chemistry-for-Healthcare Start-up secures seed investment
Belyntic, a Berlin-based chemistry-for-healthcare startup and developer of the Peptide Easy Clean (PEC) purification technology, has completed its seed financing round amounting to €1.3 million. The funding is led by the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB), with the High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) also climbing on board alongside business angel Till Knorr.
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Belyntic’s potential in the field of peptide therapeutics was immediately recognized by major industry insiders after its foundation in May 2018. Since then the startup has been ranked among the top 50 startups in the country and placed among the top 150 innovative companies in East Germany.
Peptides are small proteins. In living organisms, they control essential biological functions. Their chemical synthesis leverages an enormous potential for new drugs to fight major threats to human health like cancer or diabetes. Unfortunately, commonly available methods for purification – the critical step during peptide manufacturing – come with various shortcomings: General constraints to obtain new and more complex peptides, harmful environmental impact and limited purification throughput substantially limit the exploration of novel peptide-based drugs.
Belyntic’s proprietary “Peptide Easy Clean (PEC)” technology provides actors along the pharmaceutical value chain from research and development to production with a convenient, yet fundamentally different protocol for parallel peptide purification. PEC relies on an innovative catch-and-release purification between a novel linker molecule and a modified agarose filter material.
The major benefits of the PEC peptide purification compared to other methods are built on its innovative working principle. According to Dr. Adrian Glas, CEO of Peptide Specialty Laboratories GmbH, PEC has a unique ability to purify difficult peptides such as beta‐amyloid derivatives, or other sparingly soluble peptides: “The Belyntic purification kit enables us to obtain peptides that we just couldn’t purify before. Moreover, we can run the peptide purification process in parallel saving a vast amount of time as well as money.”
He further complimented the purification kits for their environmentally friendly design as it consumes very low organic solvents – a huge cost and ecological benefit.
“We believe that existing and future challenges of modern healthcare can be addressed by re-thinking the process of peptide manufacturing. With PEC, we can help to enable personalized treatments, get access to future-leading drug molecules and improve the efficiency of their development and production routes,” says Andreas Regnery, co-founder of the company. “The financing from the Investitionsbank Berlin and the High-Tech Gründerfonds, who are known as major German early stage investors, manifests a solid endorsement of our vision. We look forward to working closely with them as Belyntic continues to grow and succeed.”
“The freshly raised capital”, he adds, “will be used for developing new products and services to access clinical stage projects and regulated market segments as well as to settle the company’s position on the international stage. This, aside from exploring new emerging fields such as modified peptides or personalized peptide immunotherapies, will include upscaling and automation of the process.”
This vision has been applauded by Dr. Marie Asano, Investment Manager at HTGF, as purpose-led and impact-focused with a clear social conscience. In her words, “the Belyntic linker is an innovative, yet simple and elegant technology making the development of automatable, high-throughput peptide purification solution possible. This, in turn, is expected to play a role in facilitating the development and future commercialization of affordable, patient-specific, therapeutic peptide drugs.”
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