Bloomberg Businessweek Building Pharmaceutical Supply-Chain Resilience
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Nov 4, 2025 Dr. Christina Smolke, co-founder and CEO of Antheia, is on a mission to transform pharmaceutical production. She discusses the risks of U.S. reliance on foreign active pharmaceutical ingredients and how Antheia's innovative yeast fermentation technology can ensure domestic drug availability. Christina explains the unique process of programming yeast to produce critical medicines and reveals that Antheia has successfully launched its first product. She emphasizes their focus on resolving essential drug shortages and the rigorous safety standards governing their biosynthetic ingredients.
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Foreign API Dependence Is A Security Risk
- U.S. reliance on foreign sources for APIs is increasingly a national security risk.
- Christina Smolke links this risk to more frequent, longer disruptions in critical medicines.
Brewing-Like Fermentation Replaces Complex Synthesis
- Antheia replaces long multi-step chemical processes with fermentation that resembles brewing.
- The approach enables faster, more predictable, and localized production of pharmaceutical ingredients.
Programming Yeast To Make Drug Molecules
- Antheia programs yeast genomes to synthesize target drug molecules from sugar.
- At scale they ferment yeast in vats and purify the resulting pharmaceutical ingredient for formulation.