Cell Culture Media is the Biggest Target in the Push for $10-per-Gram Antibodies, Says IIT Delhi’s Anurag Rathore

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have transformed treatment for cancer and autoimmune disease, but production costs have kept them out of reach for many patients worldwide. In the first part of a two-part interview with BioPharm International®, recorded around AAPS PharmSci 360 2026, Anurag Rathore, PhD, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, explained how his team is working toward a cost of about $10 per gram.

“We are trying to get to 10 or around 10 by making processes more efficient,” Rathore said, “and then of course also looking at some of these raw materials, which are really expensive, that we use on a day-to-day basis in biopharma manufacturing.”

Rathore earned his PhD in chemical engineering from Yale University and spent about 12 years in industry at Pfizer and Amgen before joining the faculty at IIT Delhi. For the past 16 years, his group has focused on analytical characterization and manufacturing of biotherapeutic products, with the goal of making those products “more affordable and accessible to the global world.”

What will it take to make monoclonal antibodies for $10 per gram?

The target comes from a Grand Challenges call from the Gates Foundation, which sought manufacturing approaches that could reduce mAb drug substance cost of goods to $10 per gram. Typical costs have stagnated at roughly $50 to $100 per gram. The Gates Foundation and LifeArc, a UK-based medical research charity, are funding the resulting projects to make mAbs affordable for preventing and treating infectious diseases in resource-limited settings.

Rathore said there is no single answer to the cost question, because the funded teams are each taking a different approach. “People are playing with either using some non-conventional protein expression systems, instead of the traditional mammalian cell culture systems, [or] also looking at novel ways of protein purification and so on,” he said.

His own team’s project is, in his words, “probably the most conventional of all.” Rather than replacing the mammalian cell platform, the group is trying to make existing processes more efficient and to find cheaper alternatives to costly raw materials. 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.

Before choosing where to focus, the team ran a cost-of-goods analysis to find the largest contributors. “So that we can direct our efforts on those where we’ll get the biggest bang for the buck,” Rathore said.

Cell culture media stood out. In mAb production, Rathore said, media typically accounts for anywhere from 30% to 50% of total cost. Other high-cost raw materials include Protein A resin, which is well known as an expensive capture material, along with virus filtration and chromatography resins more broadly.

Beyond raw materials, the analysis pointed to analytical and labor costs and to the capital cost of building the facility itself. “These were some of the big buckets that are ultimately contributing to your cost of goods,” Rathore said, “and we have tried to systematically deal with them one by one.”

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.