Mass General Brigham-led team receives ARPA-H award to advance on-demand manufacturing of genetic medicines
Researchers at Mass General Brigham Gene & Cell Therapy Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital have been awarded up to $39.2 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop a new platform designed to make personalized genetic medicines faster, more affordable and more accessible to patients. The award will support a project known as FUSE (Fast Unified Synthesis and Evaluation), led by Mass General Brigham investigators in collaboration with industry and academic partners.
The project is part of ARPA-H's Genetic Medicines and Individualized Manufacturing for Everyone (GIVE) program, an initiative aimed at transforming how RNA-based medicines are produced. RNA therapeutics have shown promise for treating cancer, rare genetic disorders, infectious diseases and other serious conditions, but current manufacturing methods are complex, expensive and largely centralized. GIVE seeks to enable distributed manufacturing platforms that could bring production closer to patients and expand access to these therapies.
Through the FUSE project, investigators will develop a compact, automated system capable of producing and analyzing RNA medicines within a single integrated platform. The technology combines manufacturing and quality-control processes that are typically performed across multiple facilities, with the goal of reducing production timelines and simplifying the path from design to treatment. The platform is designed to support a range of emerging genetic medicines, including RNA therapies and personalized cancer treatments.
"We envision a future in which genetic medicines can be manufactured where and when they are needed, rather than requiring complex production and shipping networks," said lead and principal Investigator Alex Wesselhoeft, PhD, director of the RNA Therapeutics Core in the Mass General Brigham Gene and Cell Therapy Institute. "Support from ARPA-H will allow our team to bring together experts from across academia and industry to develop technologies that could make personalized RNA medicines more accessible to patients and help accelerate the next generation of precision therapies."
The multidisciplinary team includes Mass General Brigham collaborators from the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center, led by Mark Poznansky, MD, PhD, and Ann Sluder, PhD, and Avanish Mishra, PhD, from the Center for Engineering in Medicine and Surgery and the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research. The team also includes Anubhav Tripathi, PhD, from Brown University, along with industry partners NanoMosaic LLC, DINYA DNA, and Lilac Biosciences. Together, the team will combine expertise in DNA synthesis, RNA manufacturing, microfluidics, analytical testing and device development to create an integrated system that can be deployed in hospital and near-patient settings.
About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.