New drug manufacturer Neion Bio has emerged from stealth after incubating a novel way to cook up biologic drugs. After its founding two years ago, the company is cracking open a multi-product commercial biosimilar partnership with an unnamed drugmaker.
Using its Raptor platform to produce recombinant biologics in eggs, the company is teaming up with an unnamed pharma company to co-develop and supply up to three monoclonal antibodies in a deal that includes upfront and milestone payments, plus profit sharing upon potential commercialization.
“Neion Bio’s platform removes the capital intensity and process constraints of traditional biomanufacturing, enabling highly scalable and resilient production while materially lowering the cost of development and supply,” CEO and co-founder Dimi Kellari said in a company release.
“Biopharma manufacturing has not changed in decades” and has now become a “major bottleneck” in making new breakthrough medicines, Kellari added, hampering supply and domestic production of existing critical therapeutics. To address these issues, Neion is turning to eggs, which it calls “nature’s most powerful molecular factory.”
By re-engineering the “self-contained, naturally sterile vesicles” in standard chicken eggs, Neion says it can produce “virtually any biological therapeutic” with low costs, simple operations and high levels of control.
“Millions of years of evolution have sculpted this system into an extremely prolific producer of complex proteins,” co-founder and chief technology officer Sam Levin, Ph.D., commented in the release. “By leveraging this natural architecture, we’ve created a fundamentally superior way to produce biological therapeutics.”
The company launched in 2024 with $11 million in financing collected through a consortium of venture capital firms.
Upon now emerging from stealth and inking its first commercial project, Neion has roped in industry veteran Ming Li to serve as president of commercial operations. Li joins Neion after spending eight years heading up corporate development at Alvogen, more recently leading Alvotech’s strategy as chief strategy officer.
The idea behind Neion came from Levin and Kellari’s musing on why medicines are often made using Chinese hamster ovary cells, Kallari explained in a LinkedIn post. The cell lines of Chinese hamsters have been used since the 1950s to produce several of the world’s top-selling drugs, including Roche’s Herceptin and AbbVie’s Humira. Meanwhile, chicken eggs are used to produce some flu vaccines.