Avectas, an Ireland-based cell engineering platform developer backed by biopharmaceutical company Emergent BioSolutions, has received $20m in a funding round led by private investor Séamus Mulligan, according to the Irish Times.
Spun out of National University of Ireland (NUI) Maynooth in 2012 as Profector Life Sciences, Avectas has built a cell engineering platform called Solupore that enables drug developers to create therapeutic cells by injecting advanced molecules including proteins or messenger RNA into cellular subtypes such as immune system T-cells.
The company raised $10m in a round also led by Mulligan in April 2019. It had previously secured $2.4m through a collaboration deal with therapeutics developer Adapt Pharma, now a subsidiary of Emergent BioSolutions, in 2015.
Adapt Pharma subsequently provided $1.8m of a $1.9m convertible debt round in 2018 that was converted to equity months later, when it also exchanged $4.2m in notes from a 2017 round. Adapt owned a majority stake in Avectas as of 2018.
The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.