Limula receives a FIT Tech Seed loan of CHF 100'000
© 2022 EPFL
Founded at the end of 2020, Limula has developed a platform for the automated production of personalised therapies. The Tech Seed loan from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT) will help Limula finalise its demonstrator and develop partnerships for a pilot phase.
Cell and gene therapies represent a new paradigm in personalised medicine: they allow a complete remission, both for acute and chronic diseases, based on the reprogramming of immune cells taken from individual patients. Thanks to this autologous approach, these therapies redesign therapeutic interventions from a one-size-fits-all treatment to truly personalised medicine. Over the past decade, clinical trials have repeatedly proven their safety and efficacy, leading to regulatory approvals and the introduction of many life-saving treatments for people who previously had no therapeutic option. However, due to their high cost (between 250,000 and 2 million Swiss francs), mainly due to the complexity of their production, it is impossible to provide cell therapies to all patients who could benefit from them.
Limula was created with the mission of making cell therapies accessible to everyone in need, at a reasonable cost, wherever they are. To achieve this goal, a multidisciplinary team of 7 engineers and biologists has developed an automated solution that allows for a future where these revolutionary therapies will be produced in a decentralised way, directly in the hospital.
The companies developing these treatments today have limited production capacity, partly due to logistical problems associated with a centralised approach. But the complexity of the manufacturing process, which requires highly skilled labour and expensive infrastructure, is the main reason why supply is not keeping pace with demand. To solve this problem, Limula has built a technology platform that enables the automation of cell therapy manufacturing with a single, compact instrument. In addition, encapsulating all process steps in the same system eliminates the need for a multitude of devices and manual steps, thereby significantly reducing costs.
Among other awards and accolades, Limula was a finalist in the >>venture>> business case competition in 2020, received the Gold Award from the MassChallenge accelerator the same year, and entered the Top100 Swiss startups in 2021. In the following steps, Limula will establish and equip its own laboratory in the StartLab incubator located at the Biopôle in Lausanne, grow its team and move from prototyping to the industrialisation of its innovative bioreactor. Furthermore, the FIT Tech Seed loan will allow the startup to finalise its demonstrator and start a pilot phase with partners ready to test the new technology on their use case.
Contact:
Luc Henry
CEO and Co-Founder
[email protected]