Rheavita

Rheavita is pioneering freeze-drying technology for pharmaceutical products. Many drugs today are freeze-dried to ensure sufficient stability during distribution and storage, avoiding the use of expensive cold-chain storage and transport. The Ghent start-up developed the world’s first end-to-end solution for continuous freeze-drying which not only meets the needs in biopharmaceutical product development and production but also makes drug delivery to patients more efficient and flexible.

The patented Rheavita freeze-drying technology integrates all traditional – separate – freeze-drying process steps into one continuous production line. Compared to the traditional freeze-drying process, RheaVita’s approach has several advantages: very fast product and process development with limited experimental efforts, no scaling-up problems, shorter cycle times, lower production costs, less cleanroom space required and an improved, uniform product quality.

Rheavita, founded in 2018 as a spin-out from UGent, thus enables faster product development: what traditionally takes a few days can now be done in a few hours. The technology allows both centralised high-volume production and decentralised production of low-volume but high-value products. Therefore, Rheavita’s solution is also ideally suited for innovative biopharmaceuticals, such as gene therapy, RNA-based therapies, antibodies and vaccines, and for the production of personalised medicines and drugs for rare diseases.

In 2021, Rheavita closed a series A financing of €2.5 million in order to perfect their new drug manufacturing technology and accelerate the commercial launch. The round was led by Ghent-based venture capital investor Novalis Biotech and PMV.

Rheavita will use the funding to further develop and accelerate the commercialisation of their innovative technology, as well as to expand the team and further develop the organisation: important steps in the company’s development. In addition, Rheavita will continue to offer product feasibility studies and provide customers with product and process development support using their breakthrough technology. There is considerable interest in this from a lot of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, providing Rheavita with a unique opportunity.

PMV’s support should enable management to further develop the technology in Flanders and commercialise it worldwide.