Antibody Manufacturing Costs Have Fallen From $35 to About $12 per Gram, Says IIT Delhi’s Anurag Rathore

Cutting monoclonal antibody (mAb) manufacturing costs to about $10 per gram is no longer a distant goal for one research team. In the third and final part of a three-part interview with BioPharm International®, conducted as part of its AAPS PharmSci 360 2026 coverage, Anurag Rathore, PhD, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, said his team has already moved most of the way there.

“When I say make process more efficient, we are not making it efficient by just dropping some process steps or doing less of purification or anything,” Rathore said. “Essentially, our process is what a conventional process is.”

“We started ourselves at around $35 a gram,” Rathore said. “Today we are roughly around $12 a gram. So we’re getting close to the $10-a-gram target that we have.”

In the first part of the interview, Rathore described how a cost-of-goods analysis identified cell culture media as the largest single cost driver in mAb production. In the second part, he explained how his team protects product quality and why $10 per gram could make antibodies viable against infectious disease. In this final installment, he discussed which cost-saving steps manufacturers can adopt now and which will take longer.

Which cost-saving steps can antibody manufacturers adopt today?

The $10-per-gram target comes from a Gates Foundation Grand Challenges call, which noted that mAb costs have stagnated at roughly $50 to $100 per gram. Rathore’s team, one of the groups funded through the Gates Foundation and LifeArc program, began the project at about $35 per gram and has since reached about $12 per gram.

According to Rathore, some of the changes behind that drop are “fairly easy for manufacturers to implement.” His team worked with a major cell culture media supplier and showed that a media priced at roughly half the usual cost could still support a reasonably efficient process. “Things like that, I think, are fairly easy for anybody to implement,” he said.

Further savings are likely to come from process intensification, which Rathore expects to draw growing interest. Approaches such as continuous chromatography and continuous ultrafiltration/diafiltration “can significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing,” he said. LifeArc describes the IIT Delhi project as a pilot of a continuous processing platform intended to support affordable antibody manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries.

Continuous processing is harder to adopt, especially for manufacturers with no prior experience, Rathore said. He expects it to spread gradually, through what he described as “piecemealing,” as companies intensify individual unit operations rather than converting entire processes at once.

That shift is already underway at some companies. In a BioPharm International interview on Enzene’s continuous platform, Shilpa Gadgil, vice president for bioprocess development at Enzene, described the platform’s commercial status: “It’s not a pilot, it’s a market reality today.”

Rathore expects adoption to widen in two directions over time. More manufacturers will take up continuous operations, and individual manufacturers will intensify more of the unit operations within their own processes.

AAPS PharmSci 360 2026 took place October 24–28 in New Orleans. To explore more of our conference coverage, click here.
Check out the first part of this three-part interview here.

Watch the second part here.

About the Speaker

Anurag Rathore, PhD, professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Delhi
Anurag Rathore is a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He earned his PhD in chemical engineering from Yale University and worked for about 12 years at Pfizer and Amgen before joining IIT Delhi. His research focuses on the analytical characterization and manufacturing of biotherapeutic products, with an emphasis on making biologics more affordable and accessible worldwide.