Modern medicine is facing a significant pricing crisis. While breakthrough gene therapies offer potential cures for rare genetic diseases and aggressive cancers, the prices often exceed £370,000 or even £1 million per patient, making them a logistical nightmare for healthcare systems.
The bottleneck usually isn’t the science itself, but the complex, expensive manufacturing of viral vectors needed to deliver the treatment. Addressing this critical supply chain hurdle, UK biotech Tozaro has secured fresh capital to reduce production costs.
The Bedfordshire-based company has successfully raised £6 million ($8.2 million) in a new funding round. Mercia Ventures led the investment, investing capital from the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II alongside its own funds, with participation from existing backers. This latest funding injection brings the total raised by the company to £23.7 million.
The UK biotech company plans to utilise the funds to secure new commercial partnerships and scale its operations, aiming to make life-saving treatments for conditions like leukaemia and Huntington’s disease more financially viable.
Mark Payton, CEO of Mercia Asset Management, explained why the manufacturing process is the key target for investment: “The growth of this exciting new generation of biological therapeutics is being held back by the extreme cost of production. Tozaro is developing an approach that will significantly reduce this cost, without shouldering the risk of the therapist’s clinical development. It’s a real privilege to witness the significant commercial progress made over the past year, moving from platform development into meaningful engagement with downstream processing partners and potential customers.”
David Tindall, Senior Investment Manager at the British Business Bank, added: “The Midlands Engine Investment Fund II was established to support the kind of innovation that helps businesses stand out, become market leaders and deliver better solutions to those who need them most. It is inspiring to see Tozaro, based in Bedfordshire, breaking barriers in the sector, and we’re proud to play a role in their growth journey.”
Solving manufacturing inefficiencies
Originally founded in 2015 as MIP Discovery, Tozaro employs machine learning and molecular modelling to solve the industry’s manufacturing inefficiencies.
Traditional methods rely on expensive proteins to produce viral vectors. The UK company replaces these with ‘Smart Polymers’, synthetic compounds that are cheaper and more stable.
The Smart Polymer platform utilises >500 chemical groups to develop specific binding compounds, compared with traditional technologies that use proteins and peptides, which typically use ca. 20 amino acids.
The technology is currently being deployed to improve the yields of lentiviral vectors used in CAR-T cancer immunotherapies and AAV vectors used in broader gene therapies. Tozaro’s lead programs are novel reagents for binding lentiviral and AAV vectors, where manufacturing yields are poor & innovation is urgently needed.
Tozaro’s mission is to increase recovery, improve purity and simplify manufacturing processes. The Smart Polymer platform has broader applications for generating stable, cost-effective chromatography products across the biopharmaceutical Industry.
Tozaro is located in the UK with 28 employees & is supported by a number of venture capital & angel investors.
Jason Slingsby, CEO of Tozaro, commented, “Tozaro is leading the way in using high-value polymers to transform production of some of the world’s most innovative but costly medicines, and our technology is attracting global interest. By improving manufacturing yields and quality while reducing costs, we can remove the barriers and enable more patients to access these life-changing cell therapies.”
