With a hefty investment led by Bain Capital and a new commercial facility on the horizon, growing CDMO Serán Bioscience is looking to bridge the gap between clinic and market for its customers.
Equipped with a $200 million investment led by Bain’s Life Science arm, Serán has set its sights on the build-out of its first commercial production plant, which is slated for completion in 2026. Serán's existing investor, Vivo Capital, remains a "key shareholder," according to a Tuesday release.
Serán's plant will support oral, pulmonary and nasal delivery modalities with commercial-scale particle engineering solutions like spray drying, hot melt extrusion, nano-milling and fluid-bed manufacturing, Serán said. Additionally, the new plant will offer services for a range of finished dose forms, including granulation, tableting, coating, encapsulation and powder filling.
At the same time, Serán has an adjacent facility in the works that will add packaging, labeling, sterilization and distribution to the company’s growing suite of CDMO offerings.
Serán’s flagship commercial facility will be designed to “handle modern needs for modern medicines,” the company’s CEO and co-founder, Dan Smithey, Ph.D., said in an interview.
The plant will feature digitization, automation and semi-continuous manufacturing components as well as bespoke spray-drying equipment developed by Serán itself, the CEO said.
“We like to use the best tool for the problem,” Smithey said, “and if we can’t find it or buy it, which we prefer to do, of course, then we’ll build it.”
While Serán is still locking down details around the physical footprint and capacity capabilities at the plant, the company is aiming for “pretty significant-scale manufacturing,” Smithey said. He noted that the company is looking at scalability with batch sizes anywhere from a few hundred kilograms to “a couple of metric tons.”
With the new plant, Serán also expects to create about 40 to 50 new jobs in the near term, the CEO said.
“We’re anticipating that in three years or so, we’ll be double the size we are,” Smithey said.
Serán debuted in 2016 and currently has about 195 employees in Bend, Oregon, according to Smithey.
Smithey said he helped co-found Serán after realizing that many traditional CDMOs lack the material science capabilities to effectively support clients going after novel drugs and targets.
“Thankfully, Serán has grown really fast, from zero to almost 200 people in eight years, and we’re still seeing that there’s a niche to fill here,” Smithey said.
As it stands, Serán is equipped to help its customers take projects through the various clinical stages. But with the latest investment from Bain, the company aims to soon be able to tackle projects from discovery all the way to commercial manufacturing, the CEO explained.
As for Bain Capital’s Life Science arm—which is primarily known as a therapeutics investor—“we view innovation as the primary reason to invest,” Will Cozean, managing director of Bain Capital’s Life Sciences team, said in an interview.
“I don’t think that we are necessarily the right investor for a run-of-the-mill CDMO,” Cozean added, emphasizing Serán's unique capabilities.
Plans for the commercial plant come shortly after Serán completed an expansion to boost the number of process manufacturing suites at its existing facility in Bend, Oregon, from six to 14. With that upscaling complete, the company says it has significantly bolstered its clinical manufacturing capacity.