Exosome-based new drug development company, INEXOPLAT, has started to attract Series A investment. It has been about two years since it attracted Pre A investment in 2021. Considering the recent conservative market situation, the investment attraction will be completed in the first half of 2024. In this round, ViNe Ventures opened the door by executing its investment for the first time.
INEXOPLAT recently launched Series A investment round. Through this round, it aims to raise investment of 3 billion to 5 billion won($2.3 to 3.8M). It plans to complete the investment attraction by the first half of next year. Previously, it completed attracting about 2.1 billion won($1.6M) worth of Pre A investment in 2021. At that time, Mega Investment and Hanlim Pharmaceutical participated as financial investors (FI).
In this Series A investment round, ViNe Ventures was the first investor to burn 1 billion won($760,000). It is a form of acquiring redeemable convertible preferred stocks (RCPS). The investment fund is a “Vine Nudge IP-based regional company-digital new deal fund.” Since October, it has been actively investing in companies in the bio and deep tech sectors.
INEXOPLAT is a biotech co-founded by CEO Kim Sung-hwan, who has experience in producing, approving, and responding to clinical and cGMP-based products at Celltrion, and director Lee Jung-min (professor at Handong University) from Toolgen, who has experience in developing stem cell research and CRISPR technology-based treatments. It is evaluated as a team capable of both stem cell and exosome research and production and analysis research.
Exosomes that INEXOPLAT uses to develop treatments are 30 to 150nm-sized membrane particles secreted by cells. Exosomes have been found to play a key role in the activity of stem cell therapy. Accordingly, if exosomes are used for the development of new drugs, they are recently in the spotlight as candidates for new drugs with expectations that they will show more stable efficacy than stem cell therapy.
Exosome-based new drug development companies use exosomes as part of drug delivery systems equipped with active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) substances or immune control functions of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), which are used as stem cell treatments.
Through a special MSC culture technology, INEXOPLAT has a technology that allows APIs that show efficacy in specific treatments to secrete optimized exosomes. Through a differentiated culture process, it has the advantage of maximizing the pharmacological activity of exosomes through a simple process without a separate complex API loading process.
Additionally, the creation of mass purification methods for exosomes is one of the most crucial issues in the development of new exosome medications. The CRISPR system is used to create MSC cell lines that secrete exosomes for a specific purpose by gene editing to address quality differences caused by exosome producing cell lines, which are the most problematic during exosome clinical trials. To ensure the results of exosome purification with high purity, a system that can produce exosomes stably without quality change is secured.
However, despite its potential in terms of new drug development, exosomes are slow in clinical development because it is not easy to control and scale up the quality of new drug candidates under development. INEXOPLAT has its own unique platform technology that can solve these problems and succeed in commercialization.
In particular, CEO Kim, who has high expertise in the field of manufacturing quality control (Chemistry manufacturing control, CMC), known as a major obstacle to the development of new drugs based on exosomes, is considered to have abundant experience and expertise in antibody production, process, and analysis at Celltrion. It is believed that it can play a role in exosome CMC research, which has a relatively smaller production process scale than antibodies.
Shin Na-ri, managing director of ViNe Ventures, who was in charge of the investment, said, “It is possible not only to research necessary for developing new drugs based on exosomes, but also to conduct CMC research to approve successful new drug development and respond to regulatory agencies, which can be seen as the biggest strength of Inxoplatt in terms of the full cycle of new drug development.”
She added, “INEXOPLAT, which has expertise in the CMC field in the development of new drugs based on exosomes that are difficult to standardize culture conditions itself and are difficult to find professionals with expertise in CMC, is expected to conduct stable and successful clinical trials in the future.”
Reference : https://www.thebell.co.kr/free/content/ArticleView.asp?key=202312051350102760106186