Intabio Secures $9.5M Series A Funding to Advance Its Blaze™ Platform for Biopharmaceutical Quality Analysis

VCBeat (WeChat: vcbeat) has learned that Intabio, a biotechnology company headquartered in California, USA, announced the completion of a $9.5 million Series A financing round, led by Northpond Ventures. Following this round, Michael P. Rubin, Founder and CEO of Northpond Ventures, joined Intabio’s Board of Directors alongside Jenny Rooke, a lead investor in Intabio’s seed round.

Intabio is a startup biotechnology company founded in 2015. In 2016, it launched the Blaze™ system, a solution designed specifically for biopharmaceutical companies that enables comprehensive analysis of antibodies and hemoglobin in biotherapeutic products under development, while delivering higher throughput than traditional solutions. This innovation addresses the longstanding inability of conventional testing systems on the market to meet the biopharmaceutical industry’s rapidly growing demand for high-throughput, real-time protein analysis, thereby resolving persistent challenges in drug development, manufacturing, and quality assessment.

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Intabio leverages its proprietary microchip platform to seamlessly integrate two pillar analytical methods in the development and manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals—capillary isoelectric focusing (cIEF) and mass spectrometry (MS)—into the Blaze™ system. The Blaze™ system comprises a benchtop instrument, microfluidic chips, reagent kits, and corresponding software applications. Its primary functions include: 1. Separating protein isoforms via cIEF; 2. Generating real-time whole-column imaging for the detection and quantification of protein subtypes; 3. Preparing MS samples and enabling each separated subtype to enter an adjacent mass spectrometer via electrospray ionization for molecular identification.

Since the Blaze system can provide quality analysis of pharmaceuticals within minutes, process more than 100 times the number of products compared to traditional testing systems in the same timeframe, and incur only a fraction of the cost of traditional systems, it not only helps biopharmaceutical companies increase productivity and shorten analysis time, but also reduces the risk of failure in costly therapeutic development.

In June this year, Intabio announced a collaborative agreement with Bruker to accelerate the integration of Intabio’s Blaze system with Bruker’s high-resolution mass spectrometers (MS). Under the agreement, Bruker will provide hardware and software development support to facilitate the integration of the Blaze instrument into Bruker’s MS platforms. This financing round will also provide ample funding to support the collaboration.

Intabio is a startup biotechnology company co-founded by Lena Wu and Erik Gentalen in 2015, aiming to provide key solutions for the development and manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals. With this round of financing, the company has raised a total of approximately $10 million. Intabio’s Blaze system breakthroughly integrates separation, quantification, and molecular mass determination analytical technologies, reducing the time required for protein analysis in drug development from weeks with traditional measurement systems to just minutes, improving efficiency by nearly 100 times.