The biotech company’s appointment of industry leader Dr Sharon Brownlow as Non-Executive Director further enhances Cytomos’ senior management team and its unique value proposition to key industry markets.
Dr Brownlow will play a key role in helping to accelerate Cytomos’ plans to commercialise its groundbreaking cell analysis technology in 2024. Cytomos’ Dielectric Spectroscopy (CDS) platform is set to radically transform biopharma R&D’s velocity and revolutionise bioprocess PAT adaptation by enabling scientists to collect a multitude of data on the intrinsic properties of individual cells in real-time.
Dr Brownlow’s commercial expertise, strategic guidance and input into collaborative partnerships, will make a significant contribution to the company’s Go-To-Market Strategy. Formerly Chief Business Officer, Commercial Director and Head of Collaborations at CGT Catapult (the innovation and technology organisation committed to the advancement of cell and gene therapies), preceded by roles in business development at Cobra Biologics and Applikon, Dr Brownlow’s proven track record in commercial partner engagement builds on Cytomos’ senior appointments last October of CEO, David Rigterink and CSO, Dr Lindsay Fraser.
As well as funding strategic hires, the recent £4 million package – secured from the investment round led by existing investor Archangels, and with participation from Old College Capital, Scottish Enterprise and new investor British Business Bank – is supporting the ongoing development of Cytomos’ novel technology and the acceleration of market testing to help bring its CDS platform to market faster.
The CDS platform closely monitors a broad range of individual cell features simultaneously, to provide unbiased, consistent, accurate and reliable predictive analytics for biomanufacturing and other applications. This novel technology can save and optimise batches, addressing the pressing industry needs for smarter, less labour-intensive, and more automated processes capable of driving down biomanufacturing costs as well as realising scale-out of personalised, regenerative medicine manufacture. Improving the pace and accuracy of single cell analysis and enabling in-line Process Analytical Technology (PAT) will finally allow the biopharmaceutical industry to drastically reduce costs by making critical decisions much earlier, and to bring novel therapies to market significantly faster.
“Our proprietary CDS platform provides a fast, scalable and groundbreaking approach to cell analysis,” explains David Rigterink, CEO of Cytomos. “This transformative technology provides the benefit of label-free cell analysis, enabling scientists to measure intrinsic dielectric properties of individual cells and obtain a unique profile for subsequent downstream analysis and characterisation. Whether used alone or alongside flow cytometry and, once commercialised and brought to the market, it will usher in a transformative paradigm shift to improve R&D and empower process intensification through real-time PAT.”
“We are very pleased that Sharon has joined our Board as she brings a wealth of highly valuable commercial and collaborative expertise to the company. This experience will prove invaluable as we look to bring our transformative technology to the market”, commented David Rigterink, CEO of Cytomos.
Dr Brownlow commented: “The market for PAT is rapidly increasing. I selected the role at Cytomos because the nature of the company’s transformative CDS technology marks it out as an innovator, standing head and shoulders above others in the field. CDS provides information on cell properties that other technologies simply can’t and has huge potential to radically alter the way that processes are monitored, paving the way to the ultimate goal of creating digital twins and automating high throughput processes to deliver therapies to patients that would not be viable without CDS. The CDStechnology has great scope to be transformative in both biologics and cell and gene therapies.”
“I have always been a supporter of collaborative approaches to help ensure that technologies are delivered to meet an unmet market need and in a format fit for purpose, and that this is exactly the constructive tactic that Cytomos is looking to apply moving forwards: working collaboratively and fostering co-development with leading international CDMOs and other life science organisations”, Dr Brownlow added.