University of Sheffield spinout Silvia Bio has raised £3m in seed funding to scale a technology designed to improve the reliability and yield of biopharmaceutical manufacturing, as increasingly complex medicines place greater demands on the cells used to produce them.

The round was led by Northern Gritstone, with participation from the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, managed by Future Planet Capital, Wren Capital and angel investors.

Many biological medicines, including antibodies and gene therapies, rely on living mammalian cells to produce complex therapeutic molecules. As these products become more sophisticated, manufacturing cells can struggle to produce them consistently, resulting in low yields, variable product quality and costly delays.

Silvia Bio aims to address this problem by identifying the biological factors limiting cell performance and developing targeted additives to improve manufacturing processes. Its platform profiles cells to create a detailed picture of their behaviour during production, helping identify why a process is underperforming and where intervention may be effective.

The company then uses these findings to develop specialised media additives designed to work within bioreactors. The formulations aim to improve product yield and critical quality attributes, potentially making manufacturing processes more predictable without requiring companies to overhaul their existing production systems.

The approach could be particularly relevant as biopharmaceutical developers seek to manufacture increasingly complex products at commercial scale. Improving the consistency of cell-based production may help reduce waste and delays, although the benefits will depend on the particular product and manufacturing process.

Founded by Ed Curry, Melinda Pohle, Professor Adam Brown and Professor David James, Silvia Bio builds on more than 20 years of biomanufacturing research at the University of Sheffield. The company says its platform has already been validated with industrial partners.

The new funding will support its move from the university into dedicated laboratory space at Sheffield’s Innovation Centre. Silvia Bio plans to triple its headcount, automate processes currently carried out manually, expand its commercial capacity and accelerate development of new products for licensing.

Ed Curry, CEO and co-founder of Silvia Bio, said the company’s technology gives manufacturers a clearer understanding of why cells underperform, alongside practical solutions that can be introduced directly into production processes.

Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone, said the company was addressing a significant bottleneck in next-generation medicines by combining detailed biological analysis with solutions intended to improve manufacturing yields and predictability.

The investment will also support Silvia Bio’s international expansion as it seeks to establish its platform as a wider biomanufacturing resource.