And that it has received funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda), a US Government agency responsible for countermeasures to bioterrorism, pandemics and other threats.
Feast told the Herald his firm is aiming to sell product for research-only clinical work by the end of next year, ahead of its full commercial launch.
The new capital will fund a manufacturing plant in Christchurch and boost staff from six, with four onboarding, to 17 or 18.
Although he sees a multibillion-dollar market, Feast says his firm will stay based in Canterbury, which has recently emerged as a medtech hub.
Professor Conan Fee at the University of Canterbury, who mentored Feast while he completed his PhD in biotechnology, spun out the four-year-old Precision Chroma from research he conducted. Feast founded Precision and serves as its chief executive. Bridgewest chipped in pre-seed funds.
Precision Chroma founder and chief executive Sean Feast.
Feast told the Herald the seed raise stemmed from him messaging M Ventures’ investment director Dr Oliver Hardick on LinkedIn, shortly after his company was formed in 2022 – although it would be four years before he had a product he could showcase for funding.
Hardick is in Auckland for the kick-off of Startup Week (see video above) before travelling to Christchurch for his first Precision Chorma board meeting.
US$48 billion addressable market
Feast says the total addressable market for his company’s purification technology is about US$48 billion.
It’s growing at around 11% per year as pharmaceutical companies increasingly use biological molecules – right in Precision Chroma’s wheelhouse – as the building blocks for new drugs, superseding small, synthetic molecules.
The trend developed momentum with the RNA vaccines developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, which coincided with Feast’s PhD work.
So what does it do, exactly?
“Precision Chroma is developing a new form of 3D-printed designed agarose packed-bed chromatography which enables direct affinity capture of therapeutic proteins from unclarified bioreactor harvest, potentially removing the centrifugation and depth-filtration steps normally required before Protein A chromatography,” Feast says.
Say what?
When pharmaceutical companies manufacture biopharmaceuticals, they grow living cells in massive vats. Think of this like brewing a giant batch of soup, where only one tiny, specific ingredient – the drug protein – is useful, while everything else (cell debris, waste, fluid) needs to be thrown out, Feast says.
From left: Precision Chroma’s Anna Pryor, Fabian Dolamore, Sean Feast, Campbell Stevens and Bessie Pei.
Traditionally, purifying this “soup” uses chromatography columns packed with millions of microscopic beads.
Imagine trying to filter muddy water by pouring it through a jar filled with marbles. The water squeezes through uneven, random gaps. Particles get stuck, clogging the jar, forcing you to pour slowly under immense pressure, and requiring pre-filtration just to clear the heavy mud.
Precision Chroma prints customised solid blocks, called monoliths, made of uniform hydrogels and embedded with precisely micro-engineered channels. Instead of an unpredictable pile of marbles, it functions like a multilane highway system designed to let the fluid flow smoothly without clogging, even if it’s full of heavy cell debris.
The net effect, Feast says, is that many time-consuming steps are replaced by one quick step, in what he describes as world-first technology. The new funding will to towards commercialising the process.
AI threat?
Could artificial intelligence gazump Precision Chroma?
“AI definitely has its place. It’s really good for starting the search,” Feast says.
“But at the end of the day, you have to do lab testing and real-world validation to check what the AI spits out.
“Most people have had a wrong AI response and you can’t take that risk with human health.”
‘Compelling’
Its headline investor says Precision Chroma has solved problems others found too difficult.
“Downstream purification has struggled to keep pace with the gains in upstream bioprocess productivity,” Hardick says.
“Precision Chroma addresses this by re-engineering the chromatography bed while retaining the agarose chemistry, ligands, systems and operating principles bioprocess engineers already know,” Hardick says.
“We are acutely aware of the adoption challenges associated with novel chromatography technologies.
“However, the potential to capture product directly from the bioreactor, while minimising the change required for adoption, is particularly compelling.”
Speedy
“Together we have taken an idea from the University of Canterbury and built it into a commercially relevant bioprocessing platform with genuine global interest and potential, says Bridgewest CEO Saum Vahdat.
“The speed with which the company has scaled the technology and demonstrated performance underlines how disruptive this platform can be in separations and chromatography.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer. He has recently written about Bridgewest Ventures’ first venture capital fund, Icehouse Ventures’ $150m Growth Fund III, Irish healthtech Lanas scooping up a Kiwi firm in a $100m-plus deal, Ngāi Tahu’s expanded partnership with VC firm Movac and Christchurch emerging as an aerospace and medtech hub.