Mekonos Raises $25 Million to Overcome Cell and Gene Therapy Delivery Hurdles

Mekonos raised $25 million in an oversubscribed series A round to accelerate the development of its System on a Chip (SoC), expand commercial partnerships, and support talent acquisition.

Photo: Anil Narasimha, CEO and co-founder of Mekonos

Reimagined Ventures, Fiscus Ventures, and PEAK6 Strategic Capital co-led the financing, which included new institutional and strategic investors Section 32, Sands Capital, TDK Ventures, and the venture arm of Debiopharm, and previous investors Novartis Pharma and Elementum Ventures.

“Mekonos’ novel technology is solving a critical pain point in an area of cell and gene therapy that hasn’t seen significant innovation in 20+ years,” said Neil Tiwari, who is joining Mekonos’ board of directors to represent the lead investors.

Mekonos has developed a novel chip technology platform that supports ex vivo delivery of cell payloads at the single cell level. The platform allows for multi-payload physical delivery—multiplexing—into cells with repeatable and localized dose control for precise and scalable cell engineering. The company says demonstration pilot projects with top pharmaceutical and research labs have shown outstanding cell viability and uptake in delivery of CRISPR and other payloads into immune cells, stem cells, and other fragile cell types.

Mekonos will use the new capital to expand its MEMS, microfluidics, biology, and business development functions in order to advance its proprietary, integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) for targeted ex vivo gene engineering. Jake Lesnik, previously an executive at System Biosciences, has joined the company as vice president of Business Development to expand partnerships and drive commercial strategy for Mekonos’ cell engineering and therapeutics development platform.

“Today’s announcement is a clear signal that Mekonos is building critical infrastructure to unlock personalized medicine at scale and enable cell engineering across life science verticals,” said Anil Narasimha, CEO and co-founder of Mekonos.

Author: Rare Daily Staff