Mytos, a company specializing in the automation of cell manufacturing, announced the successful closure of a Series A investment round totaling USD$19 million.
This investment, led by Buckley Ventures with the participation of IQ Capital and Wing VC, will accelerate the production and distribution of their automated cellular production system to a more significant number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to address the growing market demand.
The innovative system developed by Mytos, founded in 2018, fully automates the complex human cell production process, an essential phase in drug development.
Manual human cell production has been a significant obstacle in biotechnology, slowing down progress in creating new drugs for both large pharmaceutical companies and emerging startups.
“The most tedious process in biotechnology is the manual cultivation of human cells. All scientists have to spend hours a day cultivating cells and come in on weekends to take care of them,” explains Ali Afshar, CEO and co-founder of Mytos.
Mytos’s platform is already being used by various life science companies worldwide, and the funding will enable them to expand their sales and development teams.
The automation proposed by Mytos integrates tasks such as image acquisition, passage, and media replenishment into an automated workflow, streamlining the cellular production process.
Mytos’s ability to automate this process frees up time for scientists and reduces the risk of human errors and contamination, thus improving the performance of high-quality cells.
“With our automated system, our customers love that the setup is easy, and they can check how their cells are growing over the weekends from their phone instead of going to the lab.
“Normally, an automated system takes months to replicate a manual process, but ours is set up on the same day. This new funding will allow us to accelerate our deployment to reach more customers, speed up their life-saving cure development, and expand into manufacturing cellular therapies,” highlighted Afshar.
Mytos’s automated cell cultivation system can generate a wide variety of complex cell types in weeks, ranging from brain to heart cells.
Using stem cells (iPSC) as a starting point, this system can produce heart cells that begin to beat spontaneously in 12 days.
By automating the entire cellular manufacturing process, Mytos ensures consistent and high-quality production while enabling remote monitoring of cell quality through digital data capture accessible from a smartphone or other digital device.
In an industry where quality and efficiency are crucial, the investment received will support the advancement and adoption of this innovative technology in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry.
