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Helico Raises Seed Funding For Producing Therapeutics And Medicines In Plants

May 17, 2022over 3 years ago

Round Type

seed

Auckland

Description

Biopharma Helico has completed an AUD $1.8 million seed funding round, attracting international interest in its plans to produce therapeutic compounds from plants and, ultimately, ‘edible medicine’.

Company Information

Company

Helico

Location

Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

About

However, Vensky says that the company is looking to scale up the production overseas, in Australia or US for example, where the regulatory frameworks for larger GMO production are well known. “Andritz has expertise in industrial insulin purification and insulin is Helico’s first target,” Vensky says. Helico has strong backing from the New Zealand Government’s Callaghan Innovation, which has bought into the deep-tech startup’s vision to “replace large, expensive pharmaceutical factories with growing high-value therapeutic compounds via low-tech agriculture”. Vensky says Helico is developing a proprietary computational platform for synthetic biology research using the latest modelling tools and AI-based prediction algorithms.