Nov. 5 Quick Takes: $103M raise to support bit.bio’s cell coding tech

Bit.bio’s first close of $103 million in its series B round brings the total venture raised by the U.K. cell coding company to at least $148 million. New and existing investors in the series B include Arch Ventures, Charles River Laboratories International Inc. (NYSE:CRL), Foresite Capital, National Resilience, Metaplanet, Puhua Capital and Tencent. Bit.bio plans to deploy the funds to further develop opti-ox, a gene engineering technology that the company says enables unlimited batches of any human cell to be manufactured consistently at scale through direct reprogramming of stem cells, and the company’s ioCells product portfolio. 

Isomorphic Labs is the latest  Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) creation in life sciences. The commercial venture’s charge is to “reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach and, ultimately, to model and understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of life,” Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs and DeepMind, wrote in a blog post...