Lifeboat Foundation

64x Bio comes out of the Har­vard De­part­ment of Ge­net­ics. CEO Lex Rovn­er and her team — which right now, sits around 10 peo­ple — are look­ing to tack­le a key hur­dle for ma­jor com­pa­nies: man­u­fac­tur­ing cell and gene therapies.

Rovn­er met Church while get­ting her PhD at Yale, and went on to do a post­doc­tor­al re­search fel­low­ship in his lab, and, when talk­ing to folks in the in­dus­try, found a mas­sive vi­ral vec­tor man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck that wasn’t be­ing talked about.

Af­ter a seed fund­ing round and the com­pa­ny’s launch in 2020, it made some noise in the in­dus­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Covid-19 made bot­tle­neck is­sues more vis­i­ble. There’s a wait­list to get a vec­tor from man­u­fac­tur­ers, and not much of a so­lu­tion to the problem.