ElevateBio Brings Centralized Model To Cell And Gene Therapy

The company run by former Alexion and bluebird executives raised $150m and will build an R&D and manufacturing facility to serve its own start-ups and strategic partners, centralizing capabilities that would take individual firms millions of dollars and years to develop for a single product.

ElevateBio exterior camp base buidling 2 — BaseCamp will be ElevateBio's cell and gene therapy hub. • Source: ElevateBio

ElevateBio LLC executives have been working for about a year on a cell and gene therapy strategy that they brought out of stealth mode on 13 May with the announcement that they raised $150m in series A venture capital. The funding will mainly go to building research and development and manufacturing capabilities, but also to fund small subsidiaries based on individual R&D programs and platforms.

The firm's hub-and-spoke model – a structure that involves a centralized entity spinning out multiple product- or platform-specific start-ups –...