Abselion Raises £6.6M Series A to Bring At-Line Protein Quantification to the Biopharmaceutical Industry
October 28, 2024
Abselion, a Cambridge-based life sciences instrumentation company, has secured £6.6 million in Series A financing to bring its Amperia protein quantification system to market. The round was led by M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA, with new investors BioProcess 360 Partners and Untitled Ventures joining alongside existing backers BGF and R42. Oliver Hardick of M Ventures and Chris Major of BioProcess 360 Partners have joined Abselion's newly formed board of directors as part of the investment. The company will use the proceeds to commercialise the Amperia system and expand its technical capabilities through 2025 and beyond.
Abselion was founded in 2018 as a spinout from the University of Cambridge — operating initially under the name HexagonFab — by CEO Ruizhi Wang. The company started with a specific ambition: to make protein research simpler. Its founding team brought together expertise across biology, nanotechnology, and engineering, working at the intersection of disciplines that have historically been siloed. The company secured a £1.9 million seed round in 2021, led by Cambridge Enterprise and joined by Parkwalk Advisors, which provided the initial capital to develop the core technology into a prototype instrument ready for commercial validation.
The problem Abselion is solving is a familiar frustration for anyone who has run a bioprocessing or biologics development programme. Quantifying how much of a specific protein — an antibody, a viral vector, an enzyme — is present in a sample at any given stage of a process typically requires sending samples to a central analytical laboratory and waiting hours or days for results. This delay is not merely inconvenient; it compounds costs, slows development cycles, and prevents the kind of real-time decision-making that could meaningfully accelerate drug development timelines. Abselion's Amperia system is designed to put that capability directly at the point of need: at the bench, beside the bioreactor, or in the process development suite, delivering results in under one minute from crude, unprocessed samples.
The technology underpinning Amperia is Abselion's proprietary Redox Electrochemical Detection (RED) platform, which detects proteins by measuring the electrical changes that occur when molecules interact with the sensor surface. This approach is highly sensitive and specific, operates without the need for complex sample preparation, and is compatible with a wide range of biologics including monoclonal antibodies, adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) used in gene therapy, and other complex proteins. The instrument integrates with standard 96-well plate formats and is controlled through intuitive software, making it accessible to scientists without specialist analytical expertise. The NHS Blood and Transplant Clinical Biotechnology Centre has already adopted the platform to streamline viral vector development for gene therapy programmes, providing an early and high-profile validation of the system in a demanding clinical context.
The commercial opportunity for Amperia sits at the intersection of two high-growth markets: the rapid expansion of biologics-based therapeutics, particularly monoclonal antibodies and gene therapies, and the increasing pressure on biopharmaceutical developers to compress timelines and reduce the cost of bringing new treatments to patients. M Ventures' lead role in the round reflects Merck's deep strategic interest in bioprocessing analytics through its MilliporeSigma division, and brings significant domain expertise and commercial network to support Abselion's growth.
Sources
Thank you to our Patrons & Partners:
