Groundbreaking new projects launched to lower the cost of monoclonal antibody production

Seven new projects aimed at reducing the costs of manufacturing monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have been awarded by LifeArc and the Gates Foundation. 

mAbs hold promise for infectious disease prevention and treatment, but they remain largely out of reach in resource-limited settings due to high costs and supply chain limitations. The $5 million partnership between the two organisations, aimed to tackle some of the main drivers of high costs, improving affordability.  

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Treatment with mAbs can be highly targeted, safe, and effective and they are increasingly effective in just one dose. They also have the potential to be developed rapidly compared to other drugs and can be used to prevent, as well as treat, infections. This can make them especially valuable in high-risk populations and for emerging infectious threats.  

But without targeted action to address production methods and costs, mAbs will remain costly, globally scarce and underutilised. The costs of producing mAbs have stabilised at between $50–100 per gram, but for accessibility in low-resource settings, these costs need to be driven down to below $10 per gram. 

Humanising antibodies

Ghada Zoubiane, Head of Global Health – Infection, at LifeArc says: “LifeArc has a strong track record of humanising antibodies. We know the potential they have for treating a wide range of conditions, including infectious diseases. But the costs remain too high for global access and adoption.

”For example, Africa holds only 1 per cent of the global mAb market, but carries a high burden of diseases they could help prevent and treat. Working with the Gates Foundation to support these projects is a pivotal step towards realising our ambition of developing affordable and accessible innovations for everyone, especially the communities most impacted by infectious diseases.” 

The projects being funded by LifeArc ($2.3 million) are: 

• Professor Chris Love and Dr Hadley Sikes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Self-Scaling Continuous Recovery for Exceptionally low-cost antibodies (SCoRe). This project aims to create a continuous flow platform with high mAb recovery, while also replacing expensive resin-based chromatography with engineered binding agents and membrane technologies. If successful, this would enable large amounts of antibodies to be produced on small, local sites. 

• Professor Ashutosh Chilkoti, Duke University - Self-purifying Antibodies by PAse Separation. The most common method of purifying antibodies is through chromatography, which is expensive and slow. This project will pioneer a low-cost, high-throughput technology using engineered fusion proteins together with elastin-like polypeptides, replacing chromatography and reducing timelines and also costs by up to 90 per cent. 

• Dr Antti Aalto, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland - Tric-mAbs. This project aims to use cells from the filamentous fungus, Trichoderma reesei, to produce therapeutic mAbs. Current approaches use mammalian cells which are expensive to grow and inefficient at producing antibodies – this strategy could produce more mAbs in less time, and at a lower cost. 

Dr Antti Aalto, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland said: “VTT is excited to explore new technologies that have the potential to reduce the costs of monoclonal antibodies. Fungi are exceptional protein-making machines by nature and biotechnology has leveraged this remarkable feature for decades to produce industrial enzymes, and food proteins. Our goal is to apply the same principle to antibody production as a solution to achieve equity in global access to biopharmaceuticals.” 

Gates Foundation

The projects being funded by the Gates Foundation ($3.0 million) are: 

• Anurag Rathore, Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) - Demonstration of Low-Cost Monoclonal Antibody Manufacturing. This project will pilot a continuous processing platform for monoclonal antibody production, building on IIT Delhi’s existing system to demonstrate scalability to commercial settings. It aims to validate reduced costs and increased yields compared to batch processing, generating technical and economic data to support affordable antibody manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries. 

• Michael Betenbaugh and Honggang Cui, Johns Hopkins University - Fungal C1 Fermentation and Peptide-Nanofiber Capture for Low-Cost MAM01 Antibodies. This project will develop a low-cost biomanufacturing platform for the antimalarial antibody MAM01 by combining a fungal expression system with nanofiber-bound peptide purification. In collaboration with Dyadic International and Thermo Fisher Scientific, the team will optimise fermentation, purification, and recycling processes to improve yield, reduce costs, and demonstrate scalable antibody production. 
• Cristiana Boi and Ruben Carbonell, North Carolina State University - Low-Cost All-Membrane Process to Purify MAM01 Antibodies from C1 Cell Lines. This project will develop an all-membrane chromatography system using low-cost, single-use membranes to purify the antimalarial antibody MAM01 produced in the fungal C1 expression system. In collaboration with Dyadic International, the team will optimize membrane design, purification conditions, and scalability to create an integrated, affordable biomanufacturing platform. 

• James Brown, Bondi Bio, and Jake Baum, UNSW Sydney - Synechococcus Cyanobacteria as a Novel Monoclonal Antibody Production Host. This project will develop a low-cost platform for producing the antimalarial antibody MAM01 using the photosynthetic cyanobacterium Synechococcus. The team will engineer and optimize the strain for expression, purification, and proper antibody assembly, then use the results to design a scalable facility and economic model for cyanobacterial antibody manufacturing. 

The joint funding call in November last year, called on innovators, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs - from seasoned experts in biologics to pioneers in related fields - to join LifeArc and the Gates Foundation in their ambition to improve accessibility to these treatments globally.