Ginkgo Bioworks has been awarded a contract through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority’s (BARDA) Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Preparedness Consortium (BioMaP-Consortium). The goal of the project, which has a total contract value of up to $22.2 million, is to develop novel approaches that strengthen and reduce the costs of domestic biomanufacturing of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to protect against and treat infection by filoviruses such as Ebola (EBOV) and Sudan Viruses (SUDV).
The project seeks to deploy these innovations to produce the anti-filovirus mAbs cocktail of 1C3 and 1C11, discovered and developed by Emory University.
Ginkgo will lead a team composed of Advanced BioScience Laboratories (ABL), Isolere Bio by Donaldson, NeuImmune, and ProteoNic BV to develop and integrate innovative technologies that will span the entire process for producing mAb drugs.
“Rapidly scalable and cost-effective manufacturing of mAbs is crucial to our national biosecurity and public health preparedness,” said Jennifer Wipf, general manager of Ginkgo’s discovery & manufacturing solutions business unit. “We are honored to work with BARDA and our BioMaP-Consortium partners to bring these and other innovations to the domestic production of mAb-based medical countermeasures.
“We look forward to working collaboratively with Rafi Ahmed, PhD, and his team at Emory University, who have demonstrated that certain mAbs protect nonhuman primates from high-lethality filoviruses such as EBOV and SUDV. Our end goal is to help protect the U.S. population from these high-threat pathogens.”
How efficacy is defined against infectious disease
According to Tim Fouts, CSO of ABL, “We believe the team assembled brings together technology that will change the goal posts for how efficacy is defined against infectious diseases.”
“The goals of this project align perfectly with our life science vision of building innovative bioprocessing solutions that can reduce costs and increase speed of development for essential reagents and medicines,” added said Michael Dzuricky, PhD, director of R&D at Isolere Bio by Donaldson.
“Filoviral hemorrhagic fevers continue to be a serious global health risk, with 30–90% mortality, depending on the viral genus,” noted Thomas Fuerst, PhD, founder and chairman of NeuImmune. “With our proprietary geCHO BioDesign platform and our deep expertise in precision engineering of biologics with distinct glycosylation signatures, we look forward to collaborating with Ginkgo to advance novel antibodies to treat these devastating viral infections.”
“ProteoNic is proud to contribute its premium 2G UNic® vector and transposon technologies to this important collaboration. Together with Ginkgo Bioworks and partners, we look forward to developing an efficient, cost-effective production process for these life-saving monoclonal antibodies,” said Frank Pieper, CEO of ProteoNic.
This BARDA-supported initiative builds on Ginkgo Bioworks’ track record in partnering with the U.S. government to provide ongoing expertise in synthetic biology, biomanufacturing innovation, and national biosecurity preparedness.
This project has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR); and BARDA).
