About LEON

leon-nanodrugs GmbH (“LEON”) is a pharmatech company specializing in the development and marketing of its innovative technology for the encapsulation of genetic material and other active substances into nano drug carriers, such as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs).

With its technology, LEON creates the prerequisites for making modern drugs, such as prophylactic mRNA vaccines, and individual therapies, such as personalized cancer vaccines, available to patients quickly on a large scale.

The devices of LEON’s product platform are built on the innovative FR-Jet Technology that enables a huge efficiency increase in the production of LNP-encapsulated active ingredient. The GMP-compliant, aseptic devices are suitable for both clinical scale and commercial production.

In addition to its own equipment platform, LEON offers in-house laboratory capacity for process development at the IZB.

What is your motivation?

Biotechnology is not only about the development of new active substances.

Offering innovative therapeutics quickly, in sufficient quantities and at affordable prices is an ongoing challenge for drug manufacturing. For the production of personalized medicine therapeutics, such as CAR-T cells or cancer vaccines, as well as mRNA vaccines, the fragile genetic material needs to be packaged in a stable nanoparticle. While LNPs are used for this purpose, their availability is restricted by the limited throughput capacity of conventional LNP encapsulation systems – a high-cost factor and bottleneck for the development and delivery of important, life-saving drugs.

LEON’s FR-Jet devices NANOme and NANOus enable a highly efficient approach to aseptic, GMP-compliant encapsulation of active ingredients into nanoparticles, as well as rapid scale-up from preclinical scale to commercial manufacturing. NANOme is optimized for small-scale individual patient and clinical trial-size production. NANOus is a fully-automated, aseptic device enabling the LNP-encapsulation of APIs from medium- to large-scale with high throughput using process analytical technology (PAT).

Targeting users such as CDMOs or biotech and pharma companies, we aim to reduce length of time and expenses of process development while massively increasing production efficiency. These are crucial prerequisites for improving access to advanced therapies for the benefit of patients.

“The IZB offers ideal conditions for young companies to work and thrive together. We are located in the best neighbourhood for the “rising stars” of the German biotech industry, a great starting position to discover compatibilities and cooperation opportunities.”

Christian Nafe, CFO leon-nanodrugs GmbH