VintaBio Emerges with $64 Million to Manufacture High Quality Viral Vectors for Cell and Gene Therapies

Rare Daily Staff

VintaBio has emerged from stealth with $64 million in funding and a custom-built manufacturing facility to help alleviate the viral vector bottleneck in cell and gene therapy development.

Led by Decheng Capital, the funding helped support the development of its now-open 22,500-square-foot Philadelphia facility, designed specifically to streamline cell and gene therapy development and manufacturing.

VintaBio was founded by Junwei Sun and Shangzhen Zhou, who developed the first viral vectors used for life-saving therapies, including the cell therapy that cured a child of a pediatric cancer, as well as the first two FDA-approved gene therapies.

“I co-founded VintaBio to make sure viral vectors never prevent someone from receiving a life-changing treatment. At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where we developed the first gene therapy product for a group of congenital blind patients, which became Luxturna, and then created a gene therapy for babies with spinal muscular atrophy, which became Zolgensma, I saw the important role viral vectors would play in advanced medicines,” said Zhou. “With VintaBio, we now want to provide the ability to scale cutting-edge therapies for thousands more in-need patients.”

The company will be led by CEO David Radspinner who has spent nearly a decade leading the global marketing and sales efforts at top bioproduction companies including GE Healthcare Life Sciences (Cytiva) and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Radspinner joins VintaBio from ILC Dover, a New Mountain Capital portfolio company, where he served as president for the organization’s biotherapeutics portfolio. Previously he was Vice President of the Americas at Cytiva, a provider of life sciences products and services.

“There are no commercially available facilities designed and built specifically for cell and gene therapy CDMO services that can also claim the decades of foundational viral vector experience the VintaBio team has,” said David Radspinner, CEO at VintgaBio. “Shangzhen and Junwei have played key roles developing the very first cell and gene therapies, giving us unparalleled insights into how we can leverage viral vectors to enable similarly impactful therapies across the life sciences spectrum.”

Photo: David Radspinner, CEO at VintaBio