Capra Biosciences wins $17M in federal funding to re-shore US pharma production

SOSV portfolio company, Capra Biosciences, recently spoke with SynBioBeta about their expanded $17 million award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Industrial Base Management and Supply Chain, part of ASPR. The funding will help Capra build domestic manufacturing for acetaminophen and six other essential APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) that the U.S. currently imports, largely from China.

Rather than scaling up with ever-larger, single-product factories, Virginia-based Capra scales out. The firm's bioreactors run in parallel, each with purification built in from the start. They developed the process on the lab bench carried it over unchanged to commercial production. That approach enables modular, distributed manufacturing that can be replicated across regions as demand emerges.

Capra's proprietary, microbe-based systems also allows for flexible feedstocks, including glucose, glycerol, or co-products from ethanol production, unlike traditional production methods.

Capra scaled the successful pilots for aspirin and acetaminophen production in under two years, which is fast by industry standards. Capra worked closely with A-Life, part of Google X, on strain design and process development. Capra plans to use the new funds to develop five more APIs.

Capra's award is part of a broader $20 billion federal push, through ASPR's BioMaP-Consortium, to rebuild domestic biomanufacturing for essential medicines.