Harnessing More Efficient Organisms to Reshore BioManufacutring

The COVID pandemic has called attention to the United States’ reliance on a supply chain that makes access to critical medicines dependent on the ability to make them overseas and ship them in a timely manner. At the same time, harnessing new ways of making biologics, is making it possible to gain significant savings over traditional manufacturing approaches. rBIO is betting it will be able to cost-effectively produce biologics in the United States and its starting with insulin to prove its point. We spoke to Cameron Owen, co-founder of rBIO, about the how the company is engineering different organism to increase the efficiency of biomanufacturing, why it is starting with insulin, and why reshoring biomanufacturing should be viewed as a critical issue for the United States.