Wheeler Bio, a biomanufacturing company, announced today the closing of a $14M Seed financing round. The round was co-led by Echo Investment Capital and Alloy Therapeutics, with participation from Floating Point and Presbyterian Health Foundation.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s team and make its Portable CMC technology more broadly available, partnering with more preclinical CROs and antibody drug developers. Through integration with preclinical drug discovery groups, the company’s platform is designed to provide a faster, easier, and more predictable discovery-to-IND path for drug developers.
“We are delighted to have the continued support of partners and investors as we work to solve the biggest problems associated with tech transfer,” said Dr Jesse McCool, co-founder and CEO of Wheeler Bio. “With Portable CMC, we can empower preclinical CROs to halve the time to clinical supply for their customers, while significantly de-risking program onboarding for our CDMO partners. This means more medicines reach more patients faster.”
By integrating discovery capabilities with Wheeler Bio’s open source biomanufacturing processes and platforms, preclinical CRO partners can extend their offering beyond drug candidate lead selection, providing drug developers with a clearer path to IND clinical manufacturing. Wheeler’s first partner is Alloy Therapeutics—a Boston-headquartered biotechnology company providing antibody discovery platforms and services to a community of more than 100 developers.
Errik Anderson, Founder and CEO of Alloy Therapeutics, said, “We are very enthusiastic about our partnership with Wheeler Bio because its unique approach and high-quality Portable CMC services address the problems our partners face regularly when moving into the IND-enabling phase. Differentiating speed, predictability, and cost benefits amplify our mission to democratize access to foundational drug development capabilities and reduce barriers in the pursuit of making medicine.”
