BARDA Taps Emergent BioSolutions for the Manufacture of Ebola mAbs

The United States’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has granted Emergent BioSolutions a contract valued at $19.7 million to battle the emerging public health threat of Ebola. The manufacture of three Ebola monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) will occur at Emergent’s Bayview Campus in Baltimore, MD, which is the US Department of Health and Human Services designated Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing. This designation allows companies to contract with the government for requests involving requirements for “operational readiness, development, and manufacturing of CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] products, warm base maintenance, surge manufacturing, and workforce development.”

The lots of mAbs will be manufactured in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines in a 2000-L bioreactor at the Bayview campus. The campus also uses disposable technology and single-use bioreactors. Product candidates for the modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) Ebola Zaire vaccine candidate (MVA–EBOZ) were manufactured in the Bayview facility; this therapy was developed as the result of several agreements signed with the University of Oxford, GlaxoSmithKline, and the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The MVA–EBOZ candidate was manufactured in avian cell lines in a 200-L bioreactor and is currently in Phase I trials in the United Kingdom.

Other product candidates from the company’s own pipeline and candidates from its ongoing collaborations will continue to be manufactured at the Bayview facility.

Source: Emergent BioSolutions