SRI International Receives $4.3 million from DARPA to Develop a Rapid Response Therapeutic Manufacturing System

SRI International, a non-profit research institute, has been awarded $4.3 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop ProSyn, a deployable extension of SynFini, SRI’s fully automated synthetic chemistry system.

The company will collaborate with Rutgers University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems to test ProSyn as a tool for the production of therapeutic small molecules to respond to biological threats and pandemics, an October 7, 2020 company press release said. ProSyn will be dedicated to translating processes created on the SynFini to desired production levels to provide scalable manufacturing capacity.

“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, PhD, chief strategy officer of SRI’s Biosciences division and the principal investigator for the ProSyn project, in the press release. “With the addition of ProSyn, the SynFini suite may be able to address both needs. We are grateful to DARPA for recognizing this and subsequently supporting the ProSyn project, which could enable more effective response to pandemics such as COVID-19 and other biological threats.”

Source: SRI​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​