Ginkgo Bioworks has been awarded a contract through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority’s (BARDA) Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Preparedness Consortium (BioMaP-Consortium) to develop innovations 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 has a total contract value of up to $22.2 million and 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), Inc., Isolere Bio by Donaldson, NeuImmune, Inc., and ProteoNic BV to develop and integrate innovative technologies that will span the entire process for producing mAb drugs.

Jennifer Wipf, General Manager of Ginkgo’s Discovery & Manufacturing Solutions business unit, said, “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 Prof. Rafi Ahmed and his team at Emory University, who have demonstrated that certain mAbs protect nonhuman primates from high-lethality filoviruses such as EBOV and SUDV.”