Harvest Capital Strategies Raises $245M Fund for Companies Utilizing Tools of Intrexon

Funding & Investments
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January 14, 2016

Harvest Capital Strategies announced Tuesday that it has raised $245 million to specifically finance companies utilizing the synthetic biology tools of Intrexon Corporation. This is big news for Intrexon, whose subsidiaries and their genetically modified products have been prominent in the news of 2015. The Harvest Intrexon Enterprise Fund is believed to be the first investment vehicle of this scale dedicated solely to the inventions of a single company.

The pooled investment fund, which made its first sale last June, has already invested in two Intrexon-founded startups. Thrive Agrobiotics Inc. will be engineering next generation feed additives for swine using the ActoBiotics platform, a gut cell therapy Intrexon acquired in last year’s $60M purchase of ActoGenix. They hope to improve growth and health of piglets by expressing nutritive proteins in their Lactococcus strains. Intrexon Energy Partners II is the other entity which has already received support from this dedicated fund. This joint venture intends to apply Intrexon’s gas-to-liquid technology to synthesize 1,4-butanediol, a polymer precursor with a $5B global market value.

Intrexon seems enthusiastic to expand the adoption of their smorgasbord of synthetic biology tools.

Chief among these are Ultravector®, an automated DNA construction platform, RheoSwitch®, a library of eukaryotic, small molecule-inducible promoters, and the AttSite® recombinase toolkit. Developing these types of foundational genetic engineering tools has brought success to academics, but has generally fared poorly in industry due to a lack of mature applications. Other synthetic biology companies which have tried to sell genetic parts and cloning capabilities, such as Ginkgo Bioworks, have since pivoted. But as engineered cell therapies mature and bioengineering capabilities accelerate, these foundational technologies might pay off. Especially with the support of a dedicated $245 million fund.It’s also possible the Enterprise Fund will expand of some of the companies Intrexon has recently acquired. The freshest food for the GMO debate was Aquabounty’s rapidly growing salmon, which surprised everyone in November when it became the first FDA-approved GM animal. Intrexon purchased a majority of the company in 2012, about 15 years after AquaBounty initiated the FDA approval process. Last year Intrexon also acquired Oxitec and Okanagan Specialty Fruits, two newer success in the organism engineering industry. Oxitec has engineered sterile insects to control the populations of agricultural pests and Dengue-carrying mosquitoes. Successful field tests have given them momentum. Okanagan Specialty Fruits brought the first genetically engineered apple, the non-browning Arctic Apple, through FDA approval. The Harvest Intrexon Enterprise Fund may mean expansion and acceleration of these programs, or it may permit Intrexon to purchase and develop similar technologies.

Because of it’s unique dedication to a single company’s technology, the full implications of the Enterprise Fund remain uncertain. However, it is nonetheless exciting to see the commitment of powerful financiers to the field of synthetic biology. Intrexon has evolved from a foundational genetic tools company into a manager of some of the most mature applications of genetic engineering. This stimulus is unlikely to slow them down.

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