Team led by NIIMBL is Selected for Gates Grand Challenge $10.5 Million Funding Award

NEWARK, Del., Oct. 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, NIIMBL (the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals) announced that a NIIMBL-led team will receive $10.5 Million in funding through the Gates Grand Challenges Program to advance exceptionally low-cost monoclonal antibody (mAb) manufacturing. Over the three-year award, key partners including Sartorius, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Enquyst Technologies, and the University of Delaware will demonstrate technologies that are expected to substantially reduce the cost to manufacture therapeutic antibodies, thereby enabling broader access to these types of medicines. Additional contributors include Penn State, Michigan Technological University, and University College London.

"We are excited by the opportunity to demonstrate that there are existing solutions developed by industry and academic partners that can significantly reduce cost of goods and accelerate timelines," said Kelvin Lee, NIIMBL Institute Director. "We are honored to receive this grant from the Gates Foundation which will enable this exceptional team to deliver meaningful advances to antibody production efficiency."

MAbs offer targeted treatments for a range of conditions such as infectious diseases, cancer, and autoimmune disorders that affect millions globally but are expensive to produce due to complexity in the manufacturing process, strict regulatory compliance, expensive raw materials, and infrastructure investments. This project team brings together specialized expertise in technologies, economic modeling, and manufacturing processes. The team will coordinate efforts over the lifespan of the award to test and demonstrate new approaches to mAb manufacturing that can be used as a basis to achieve the "$10 per gram" goal set out by the Gates Grand Challenge.

"We are enthusiastic about this opportunity to coordinate the innovations that Sartorius brings with promising, novel workflows," said Benham Partopour, Principal Scientist at Sartorius Corporate Research. "This funding will help bring life-saving therapies to patients."

"Optimization and intensification of the downstream purification process offer the exciting possibility of breaking through to the $10/g overall target," said Todd Przybycien, professor and department head of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. "We are excited to advance the precipitation-based process we have developed with our collaborator at Penn State as part of the manufacturing solution to sustainably meet the global need for monoclonal antibodies."

"Enquyst has been eager to scale up our disruptive downstream processing technology and to deliver substantial cost reductions to the global biologics market," said Enquyst's founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Jason Criscione. "The framework that we've proposed in this project is an exciting step toward achieving this goal, and we are grateful for the support from the foundation."

This particular Grand Challenge is in honor of Dr. Steve Hadley, former Senior Program Officer at the Gates Foundation, who championed the reduction of mAbs manufacturing costs to make life-saving treatments affordable and accessible.

About NIIMBL

The National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) is a public-private partnership whose mission is to accelerate biopharmaceutical innovation, support the development of standards that enable more efficient and rapid manufacturing capabilities, and educate and train a world-leading biopharmaceutical manufacturing workforce, fundamentally advancing U.S. competitiveness in this industry. NIIMBL is part of Manufacturing USA®, a diverse network of federally sponsored manufacturing innovation institutes, and is funded through a cooperative agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce with significant additional support from its members. For information, visit www.niimbl.org.

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SOURCE National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL)