Pentagon-backed Lumen is ready to drastically slash antibody manufacturing costs

Seattle-based Lumen Bioscience co-founder and CEO Brian Finrow doesn’t want to just bring down the cost of manufacturing antibodies. He wants to cut it to a tiny fraction of the current price, and allow the commonly infused or injected treatments to be ingested as pills.

Finrow and his team of about 100 employees are working on a new way to manufacture proteins in an edible blue-green algae called spirulina, rather than in typical E. coli or Chinese hamster ovary cells.

The Defense Department is currently funding the company’s first Phase 3 trial, of a therapeutic made in spirulina. The study, with results expected in June, is focused on a treatment for C. difficile infections. It’s based on an older Merck drug called Zinplava.

Finrow told Endpoints News in an interview that Zinplava was expensive to make and difficult to administer because it required a PICC line, a type of long catheter. Merck discontinued it for financial reasons.