Nyctea Technologies, a Swedish startup, is developing a smart material that promises to significantly improve the purification of biological drugs, offering higher yields and faster cycles while reducing the amount of energy needed and the use of chemicals, plastics and water. It is one of 70 young companies in AstraZeneca’s BioVenture Hub.
“Our goal is to help AstraZeneca and the pharmaceutical industry as a whole to be not just greener but more efficient and use less resources,” says co-founder and CEO Gustav Ferrand-Drake del Castillo.
The downstream processing — getting a pure, safe drug out of a messy biological soup — accounts for 60%–80% of overall biopharmaceutical manufacturing costs. A process called chromatography has been the pharmaceutical sector’s workhorse for several decades. It works like this: you push a liquid (the “mobile phase”) containing your drug molecule through a column packed with resin beads (the “stationary phase”). Different molecules in the mixture interact differently with the resin — some stick, some don’t — so they wash out at different times or under different conditions, separating your target drug from impurities.
Chromatography works well for separating soluble species, even those of similar nature, because the purification mechanism relies on subtle differences in chemical and physical interactions between the species and the resin. However, it can take 20-40 processing steps to reach the purity needed. “It requires a huge amount of water, chemicals and a lot of plastic consumables,” says Ferrand-Drake del Castillo.
As a result, a single manufacturing run for a complex molecule can require enormous volumes of input material — producing just one kg of pure biopharmaceutical for preclinical studies can require up to eight tons of input material.
The major cost, scalability and environmental impact issues and the emergence of the next generation of biologics (cell & gene therapies, oligonucleotides, mRNA) is accelerating the hunt for alternatives, says Ferrand-Drake del Castillo. The field has a name for this pursuit: “Anything But Chromatography” (ABC).
Nyctea’s proprietary technology uses polyelectrolyte brush electrodes that can capture and release proteins with electric signals. This unlocks unprecedented efficiency, eliminating the need for harsh chemicals in purification, preserving the integrity of biomolecules while reducing environmental impact. Early outcomes of industrial collaborations are promising. For example, in collaboration with a client the yield of an antibody was improved by more than 600% in comparison to a commercial solution, he says.
Collaboration With BioVenture Hub
Ferrand-Drake del Castillo began working on Nyctea’s novel approach while studying at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. Nyctea was launched in 2021 as a university spin-out and in 2023 the team moved into the BioVenture Hub, with access to AstraZeneca’s infrastructure, its expertise and its problems.
That culture of proximity and openness — what AstraZeneca calls ‘dare-to-share’ — has been the operating principle of BioVentureHub since it launched in 2015. (See The Innovator’s separate story on the BioVenture Hub’s new SustainTech initiative with Scania and RISE). The program, which was co-funded by the Swedish government for 10 years and is now fully financed by AstraZeneca, is based on an open innovation model, which involves co-locating startups and SMEs with the global pharma company’s R&D facility in Gothenburg. The model takes a no strings attached approach, providing access to industry expertise and infrastructure without taking IP or limiting young companies from working with its competitors. (see The Innovator’s separate story about BioVentureHub’s new SustainTech initiative.)
“Solving a hardware problem in a regulated industry is hard,” says Ferrand-Drake del Castillo. Being part of the BioVenture Hub and having access to shared infrastructure to build, and industrial experts and network, really facilitates the journey. AstraZeneca makes it clear that we need to succeed on our own, but we can access the infrastructure in a synergistic and capital efficient way, while remaining an independent company.”
Nyctea is testing its technology with AstraZeneca and other pharmaceutical companies and is gearing up for product launch in 2026. “We are currently prioritizing specific purification applications and biologics where we can produce exceptional improvements,” says Ferrand-Drake del Castillo. “Each target is a huge market for us.”
ABC Competing Approaches
Anything But Chromatography (ABC) alternatives to chromatography include protein crystallization and precipitation. These technologies can overcome bottlenecks of current downstream processing by handling high process volumes. Efforts are underway to expand their use to monoclonal antibodies — historically considered too complex for crystallization. Academic groups at MIT, ETH Zurich, and several pharma R&D departments are actively working on this approach, according to press reports.
Other methods being explored include two-phase systems (ATPS),membrane-based purification, tangential flow filtrations (Asahi Kasei, Sartorius, and Cytiva are major players in this space) and magnetic bead technologies, which allow rapid capture and release of target molecules without columns, attractive for smaller-scale or personalized medicine applications.
Rather than replacing chromatography, some companies are re-architecting it into continuous multi-column systems.
The Swedish startup says its technology has multiple advantages over other approaches.“Nyctea’s electrochemical purification offers not just complete removal of chemicals but the electric signals also allow for direct monitoring and sensing of the purification process,” says Ferrand-Drake del Castillo. “Today chromatography columns are silent black boxes where in-line and off-line sensors produce a delayed read-out of the process and the current purity. Our concept opens up the black box and allows for immediate feedback into the process, creating a valuable new data source for enhanced digitalization and process optimization.”
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