In August, 2017, Dr. Sarah Harcum was chosen to lead a Clemson team in an effort to better engineer Chinese hamster cell lines to produce vaccines and drugs for diseases such as cancer. Harcum’s team is part of a multiuniversity award to Johns Hopkins and three other universities that along with industrial partners, form a center, Advanced Mammalian Biomanufacturing Innovation Center (AMBIC), part of the National Science Foundation’s Industry- University Cooperative Research Centers Program (IUCRC).
AMBIC implements engineering innovations to enhance the capabilities of our nation to manufacture these important life-extending and life-saving medicines. Such advancements will improve the competitiveness of US biomanufacturing in coming decades, leading to more economic investment by these companies and more jobs for American workers.
AMBIC brings together leading academic and industrial biotechnologists focused on mammalian cell culture manufacturing at a precompetitive research level to address the complex problems in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.
Dr. Harcum provided news about some of the Center’s progress, “We just added three new members: GSK Vaccines, KBI Biopharma, and NIST, and have a couple of other companies being finalized. Each industry member company pays $50,000 per year in membership fees, plus each university receives $150,000 per year for 5 years from NSF.”
AMBIC’s mission is to develop enabling technologies, knowledge, design tools and methods that apply and integrate high-throughput and genome-based technologies to fast-track advanced biomanufacturing processes. This multiuniversity-multiindustry partnership allows AMBIC to leverage the skills and the expertise of many faculty members across the Sites.
AMBIC is a critical catalyst towards maintaining national excellence in biopharmaceutical production by conducting research in:
1) Understanding Industrially-Relevant Biology (e.g., all -omics, bioinformatics, process and product quality, etc.);
2) Process Monitoring & Control (e.g., analytics, instrumentation, data mining and modeling);
3) Consensus and Standardization Issues (e.g., standards, simple fingerprints, raw material issues, regulatory issues, forensic bioprocessing, clonality).
