Matthew Nelson
SRI International has received a $4.3M grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop and demonstrate a tool for manufacturing small molecules as a therapeutic option in biological threat and pandemic response efforts.
The nonprofit research company partnered with the Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems and Rutgers University’s chemical and biological engineering department to create the ProSyn production technology for public health emergency use, SRI said Wednesday.
ProSyn will work as an extension of the nonprofit's SynFini, an automated platform for synthesizing chemical molecules, and is intended to accelerate translation processes to a target production level.
"Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become overwhelmingly clear that there is a desperate need for technologies that can quickly discover therapeutics against new infectious diseases, and importantly, rapidly manufacture them at scale to make them broadly available," said Nathan Collins, chief strategy officer of SRI's biosciences division and principal investigator for the ProSyn project.
