Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech company building a platform for cell programming and biosecurity, has been awarded a four-year Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract worth up to $18 million to explore new ways to manufacture complex therapeutic proteins.

For DARPA’s Reimagining Protein Manufacturing (RPM) project, Ginkgo aims to deliver advances in on-demand protein manufacturing leveraging Cell-Free Protein Synthesis (CFPS) to enable rapid, high-yield, distributed production of human therapeutic proteins that support national security objectives. Ginkgo will lead a team of representatives from Imperial College London, led by Paul Freemont, Nature’s Toolbox, Inc., Alex Koglin, and consultant Michael Feldhaus.

Therapeutic proteins bearing so-called “post-translational modifications,” such as antibodies, cytokines, and clotting factors are important in the marketplace and to DARPA, as are subunit and conjugate vaccines. These therapeutic proteins represent half of the top-selling drugs used to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases; many are also used as medical countermeasures to treat or prevent disease, injury, or death related to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats. Through this program, Ginkgo hopes to transform how therapeutic proteins are made, replacing cell-based methods with cell-free methods.

While traditional centralized, large-scale manufacturing methods have been sufficient, increasingly there are cases where rapid distributed or on-demand manufacturing is needed, such as supplying therapeutic proteins to geographically isolated areas, providing hospitals and clinics with point-of-need medicines, and improving the ability to mount rapid and targeted responses to natural or man-made biological threats and emergencies.

Ginkgo will leverage innovative technologies using its high-throughput, automated Foundry and its genetic data Codebase, a portfolio of reusable biologic assets which includes more than one billion gene sequences. Ginkgo’s synthetic biology platform, coupled with its expertise in iterative Design–Build–Test–Learn-driven biological engineering, enables the rapid prototyping, optimization, and development of proteins, enzymes, metabolic pathways, and whole organisms under commercial-scale manufacturing conditions processes.

“There is growing recognition that pharmaceutical supply chains are at risk. One way to meet this challenge is distributed manufacturing at the point of care,” said Jason Kelly, CEO, and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. “Imagine a future where drugs, including complex biologics, are produced locally or in a widely distributed manner on-demand. We’re very excited to be working with DARPA to make that future a reality.”