Avitide, a biotech company dedicated to the discovery and development of custom affinity purification solutions, announced the closing of their Series A financing. The Avitide technology is designed to discover and develop affinity purification products that will improve the fundamental timeframes and economics of commercial bioprocessing.

The financing was led by Borealis Ventures with participation from SV Life Sciences, Polaris Venture Partners, OrbiMed Advisors and Angeli Parvi. Managing partners Phil Ferneau of Borealis Ventures and Michael Ross of SV Life Sciences joined Avitide's board of directors. The proceeds from this financing will enable the further development of Avitide's custom affinity purification platform and continued commercial development of low cost and high capacity affinity resins for monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and recombinant vaccines.

"The Avitide team has pioneered an elegant and cost effective solution to a problem that bioprocess engineers have wrestled with for some time: ‘How does one selectively purify therapeutic proteins at scale without having to go through multiple chromatography steps and without requiring an affinity resin based on recombinant proteins?’” said Tillman Gerngross, co-founder of Avitide. “The Avitide technology enables rapid development of highly selective chromatography resins via chemical synthesis which are not based on costly recombinant proteins. This will have a large impact on commercial bioprocessing.”

Kevin Isett, co-founder and CEO of Avitide, added, "We can offer our partners a new standard in speed to delivery of customer-defined affinity purification products, allowing them to achieve unparalleled development timelines while obtaining a highly purified product in a single step.”

Avitide will initiate operations in Lebanon, N.H.

"We evaluated several business locations in the northeast U.S., and it quickly became apparent that the growing entrepreneurial nexus near Dartmouth College offered an outstanding combination of talented engineers and scientists, a strong entrepreneurial network, and the financial and operational resources needed to be successful,” said Isett. “We are very excited that Avitide will join this emerging biotech community.”