Flerie Invest led a syndicate of investors in the $52 million acquisition of Cobra Biologics, Charles River Laboratories’ DNA and protein manufacturing subsidiary in Sweden. The new entity, NorthX Biologics, will take over and expand the facility, which is equipped to provide GMP-grade plasmid DNA and technical protein manufacture at commercial scale.
Ibrahim Baylan, the Swedish Minister for Business, Industry and Innovation, revealed that the government will allocate resources to strengthen Sweden’s Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMP) and vaccines, which will catalyse R&D and manufacturing partnerships worldwide.
Ted Fjällman, Partner at Flerie Invest and CEO of NorthX Biologics, emphasised the importance of many different actors in Sweden, Europe, and beyond, collaborating to accelerate the scale-up of life-saving medicines based on technologies like RNA, cell and gene therapy, proteins, and microbes. He said: “We aim to be an innovation hub that helps the already excellent research groups around Europe to take the next step towards commercialisation and bringing advanced therapies to patients.”
Helena Strigård, Director General at SwedenBIO, emphasised that gene therapies are a core component of a “revolution” in medicine across disease areas. She said: “The industry is currently bringing transformative therapies to patients, which present new options in challenging disease areas. Key to this is the availability of an advanced, robust supply and manufacturing infrastructure, and the industry demand for these services is high and growing. We see an amazing gathering in the Nordics now, from all sectors, behind ATMP, and Nordic Life Science Days will obviously serve as a good platform to display this.”
Image credit: Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke
