Silvia Bio, a University of Sheffield spinout helping biopharma companies make complex medicines faster, more reliably and at lower cost, has raised £3 million in Seed funding. Northern Gritstone led the round, with additional investment from the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (managed by Future Planet Capital), Wren Capital and angel investors. The funding supports Silvia Bio as it moves into dedicated laboratory space, grows its team and automates core processes.
Many critical therapeutics such as antibodies and gene therapies rely on using living mammalian cells as factories to produce them. As those molecules become more complex, mammalian cells can struggle to manufacture them consistently, leading to low yields, variable quality and costly delays. For biopharmaceutical companies, each day a medicine is delayed can represent around £500,000 in lost sales, while patients wait longer for potentially important treatments. More than half of new biological medicines are now considered difficult to manufacture, creating pressure on manufacturers to improve performance and predictability.
Silvia Bio addresses these challenges through an integrated platform that identifies the biological bottlenecks limiting cell performance and develops precision media additives to overcome them. Proprietary cell-profiling technology creates a detailed fingerprint of how cells behave during manufacturing, providing clear, relevant insight into why a process is underperforming. Silvia Bio then uses these findings to formulate licensable, bioreactor-compatible additives designed to improve product yield and critical quality attributes across biologics manufacturing, including antibodies, vaccines and gene therapies.
Silvia Bio was founded by Ed Curry, Melinda Pohle, Adam Brown and David James, building on more than 20 years of biomanufacturing research at the University of Sheffield. Having already validated its platform with industrial partners, Silvia Bio plans to use the new capital to move from the University into the Innovation Centre in Sheffield, triple its headcount and automate processes currently carried out manually. Funding will also increase commercial capacity and support the development of new licensable products, as Silvia Bio expands its international reach and works towards becoming a leading global provider of biomanufacturing solutions.
The medicines being developed today have the potential to transform patients’ lives, but many are becoming harder and more expensive to manufacture. Our platform gives biopharmaceutical companies a much clearer view of why their cells are underperforming and, crucially, provides practical solutions that can be introduced directly into the manufacturing process. This investment will allow us to automate and scale our technology, grow our team and help more companies bring complex medicines to patients faster.
Silvia Bio is tackling a critical bottleneck in the development of next-generation medicines. Its technology combines deep scientific insight with a clear commercial proposition: helping manufacturers improve yields, reduce delays and make complex biologics more predictable to produce. Building on world-class research from the University of Sheffield and the support of our venture builder programme, NG Studios, Ed, Melinda and the team have made impressive progress, and we are delighted to support their next phase of growth.
