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 highthroughput
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).
