Sarcura secures a €1.7 M grant from FFG, the Austrian Research Promotion Agency to accelerate miniaturized and autonomous cell therapy manufacturing platform

Klosterneuburg, 5th March 2024.

The Austrian deep tech startup Sarcura today announced it has secured a € 1.7M grant from FFG’s Life Sciences Program 2023. This funding will accelerate Sarcura’s mission to develop a miniaturized and autonomous cell therapy manufacturing platform.

March 2024 / Company
Daniela Buchmayr

Cell therapy holds the promise of curing cancer and other diseases, yet the manufacturing of patient-derived cell therapies remains a formidable challenge for the industry. Quality and scalability issues contribute to substantial therapeutic costs, currently restricting access to these life-saving treatments to a mere 3% of eligible patients.

“Imagine the entire clean room manufacturing suite, along with the analytics lab, both shrunk to the size of a suitcase enabling the autonomous processing of thousands of CAR-T Therapies.

This marks the new era of cell therapy manufacturing that Sarcura aims to build, with continuous support from FFG, our investors and advisors, and our exceptional team “

Daniela Buchmayr, Co-founder and CEO of Sarcura.

“While automating manual manufacturing in the CGT industry is a logical and crucial next step, it will only yield incremental improvements as long as automation relies on a room-sized cleanroom footprint and separate analytical labs,” continues Buchmayr. “The crucial missing elements are control intelligence and miniaturization.”

As proven in other industries, transitioning from operator control to machine-generated real-time analytics will evolve automation into machine autonomy. Sarcura is driving this change by strategically utilizing silicon chip technology to develop specialized microfluidic cartridges tailored for the unique processing and control requirements of cell therapy manufacturing.

Sarcura will leverage this new grant to further advance the development of its SiPlex Prototype, a chip that integrates multiple cell sorting structures employing revolutionary silicon photonic technology on the size of a stamp.

“Big problems require completely novel, bold solutions. At Sarcura, we refuse to settle for incremental change. Pioneering at the intersection of technologies, as we do by integrating semiconductor technologies into cell therapy manufacturing, means fundamentally challenging the status quo, but this is necessary to bring life-saving cell therapies to all eligible patients,”

Daniela Buchmayr, CEO of Sarcura

About

Sarcura GmbH is an Austrian deep-tech startup developing an instrument platform for the manufacturing of advanced cell therapies. Our platform combines silicon chip technology and microfluidic processing to enable real-time process control and manipulation on a cellular level, enabling a fully automated and modular manufacturing system.

FFG: The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) is the national funding agency for industrial research and development in Austria. FFG funding and services enable high-risk innovative projects with various partners between science and business. Our funding programs are financed by the Republic of Austria, specifically the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Technology (BMK), and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Economic Affairs (BMAW). www.ffg.at