ApiJect Announces Investment by Royalty Pharma and Jefferies
$111 Million Equity Investment Round to Support Continued Development and Deployment of ApiJect’s Proprietary High-Volume Manufacturing Platform for Single-Dose Prefilled Injection Devices.
STAMFORD, Conn., May 18, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — ApiJect Holdings, Inc., the parent company of ApiJect Systems, Corp., a medical technology public-benefit corporation transforming the fill and finish and delivery of injectable vaccines and medicines, announced today that it had completed a $111 million private round of investment.
This investment round values ApiJect at approximately $300 million.
The new round was led by Royalty Pharma and Jefferies Financial Group (NYSE: JEF), which acquired a revenue interest in addition to equity. Jefferies and ApiJect’s other lenders also converted all of their debt into ApiJect equity, such that following this transaction, ApiJect has no debt on its balance sheet.
The funds will be used for continued development of ApiJect’s proprietary Blow-Fill-Seal (BFS) plastic prefilled injection system, to deploy its equipment and proprietary technologies to licensees, and for general working capital purposes. Royalty Pharma and Jefferies are represented on ApiJect’s Board of Directors, along with ApiJect co-founders Jay Walker and Marc Koska, and Hanjin In, the CEO of Tae-Chang Industrial Co., Ltd., ApiJect’s South Korean cannula supplier.
ApiJect is developing an innovative portfolio of drug delivery devices using high-speed BFS manufacturing, which is recognized by the FDA as an advanced aseptic process that forms, fills and seals a single unit dose in a continuous, automated manufacturing step. BFS technology greatly reduces the risk of contamination and error during one of the most critical steps of drug production. BFS is cost-efficient for short and long runs, and highly suitable to scale quickly in order to meet unexpected spikes in demand such as for a rapid response to population-scale health emergencies. Advancements developed by ApiJect for temperature management now enable BFS manufacturing of a vast array of sterile injectable drugs, including ultra-cold mRNA vaccines.
ApiJect Chief Executive Officer Jay Walker commented: “This is an important day for injection device innovation, and, with that, the future health of billions of people throughout the world. The investment provided by Royalty Pharma and Jefferies supports further development of an injection technology that can scale rapidly and efficiently to meet global demand for injectable medicines.”
Mr. Walker further said: “We welcome Royalty Pharma’s commitment to the ApiJect mission. Royalty Pharma has a proven track record in selecting successful partners and in assisting in advancing its partners’ goals. We could not ask for a better strategic partner from within the pharma industry. In Jefferies, we have a partner that has been with us from virtually the beginning of ApiJect.”
“We are delighted to form this win-win partnership with ApiJect,” said Pablo Legorreta, Royalty Pharma’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The global pandemic highlighted the clear unmet need for a new kind of prefilled syringe that can be rapidly produced to respond to public health threats, and at massive scale that would be capable of delivering hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of doses to people in the U.S. as well as globally. ApiJect is developing a truly innovative technology, that could transform the manufacturing and delivery of life-saving injectable drugs in a way that would also make these medicines safer and more readily accessible for patients around the world.”
“We are proud of our association with ApiJect and believe strongly that their solutions will be a positive gamechanger in many of the most critical aspects of improving health globally,” said Rich Handler, CEO of Jefferies.
The first potential device made on the ApiJect Platform is the Prefilled ApiJect Injector, a single-dose prefilled injector designed to efficiently deliver a 0.5mL dose into a patient with a simple squeeze of the BFS container by the healthcare professional. This new type of prefilled injector will be ApiJect’s first product submitted for regulatory review and approval. The Prefilled ApiJect Injector and its manufacturing process include:
- An aseptically filled single-dose container, designed to enable efficient and intuitive injection administration.
- A pen-needle-style hub (including a patented connector for BFS container interface and Needle Hub mounting) that turns the BFS container into an injection device.
- Innovations in temperature management to expand the range of medicines and vaccines suitable for BFS packaging.
ApiJect recently launched its Technology Development Center in the greater Orlando area to bring to the U.S. critical capabilities for device design and engineering, and BFS mold development, as well as for small-scale manufacturing of single-dose, prefilled injectors and other injectable devices. Its purpose is to dramatically reduce the time and processes necessary for product development. ApiJect’s Technology Development Center supports the company’s existing fill-finish lines at its manufacturing partner site in South Carolina, which currently has the capacity to produce up to 540 million single-dose prefilled injectors annually.
About ApiJect Systems
ApiJect Systems, Corp., is a public-benefit medical technology company working to use our platform to bring more prefilled, single-dose injections to patients everywhere. The ApiJect Platform enables pharmaceutical and biotech companies to design scalable prefilled injectors and efficiently fill-finish them with their injectable drug products. This can be done either on one of their own Blow-Fill-Seal packaging lines with ApiJect-licensed technology, or at one of ApiJect’s world-class manufacturing partners.
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SOURCE ApiJect Systems Corp.
