FI Testimonials is an FI Group campaign featuring a series of interviews in which we delve into how we assist our clients in nurturing their ideas and share our customers’ perspectives on our services. Through their testimonials, we explore various companies from diverse sectors as they share their innovation projects, the challenges they face, and how collaboration with FI Group has helped them achieve their goals.

Our first video features Leanbio, a biopharmaceutical CDMO, we had a conversation with their CEO, Albert Font, who shared insights about the company’s present and future. Have you heard about development of biologic products before?

Read the full interview below.

What is Leanbio?

I am Albert Font and I am the CEO of Leanbio. Leanbio is a Biopharmaceutical CDMO, which means we offer biologics development and manufacturing services. We also specialise in recombinant proteins, plasmic DNA and MRNA.

We are a company with a global scop and our main objective is to make the journey as easy as possible for our clients, from the initial stages until the product reaches the market.

Leanbio currently has almost 400 square metres in the Barcelona Science Park. They are distributed in laboratories dedicated to process development, analytical methods development and quality control. We also have different pilot plants to provide services up to toxicological studies. And we are currently expanding our production capacity in a new production facility that will be almost 4000 square meters in size, with three main production lines: one based on microbial expression systems, one based on cell cultures and then also we’ll have some dedicated rooms to making MRNA-based products.

Apart from these three main production lines, we will have different services like quality control to release the product and a development area of about 500 square meters of development and scaling, and also offices, warehouse, and so on.

Can you describe the project you worked on with FI Group and the challenges faced?

Due to the growth that’s been taking place over the last few years, and the track record of bringing products to market, both for startups in new biological entities and in biosimilars, Europe wanted to recognise this ability of the company and has awarded us with a PERTE Salud Vanguardia.

We have been supported with the capabilities of FI to support us get this grant.

This grant is mainly intended to help us to leverage all the private investment that we’ve had and it will assist us to invest in productive equipment of the different lines that Leanbio will have in its new production plant.

What would you say the key achievements and benefits generated from this collaboration were?

At this time Leanbio is already acquiring different equipment that will be key to preparing the three production lines of the new plant.

This support will also help us to be able to hire key personnel, which will support the developments and manufacturing programs of our customers.

Right now we are aligning all these different activities so that the plant will be ready by 2025. Given the investment required in this type of production plant, specifically biopharmaceuticals, it’s always important that private money, equity, come with a share of public money, in this case it would be PERTE Salud Vanguardia. Since this implies, or links, that there is an alignment of private enterprise with public institutions.

How was your experience working with FI Group?

Working with FI Group has been very easy. Thank you, not only for your expertise in supporting companies like us, I am very pleased to be able to get this kind of support. It has also been important to be able to count on their flexibility and the different people who have been part of this project, all of them have an important technical background, and that they enabled the project to obtain this grant.

Watch the video here!