MEDFORD, Mass.– Sunflower Therapeutics, a public benefit corporation dedicated to transforming global access to protein manufacturing, announced today it has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of up to $2.36 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The two-phase award begins with $300,000 in initial funding, with additional funds to be released as the company achieves key milestones.
The grant will support Sunflower’s development of an automated, continuous cell disruption platform designed to improve large-scale production, separation, and purification of virus-like particles (VLPs) for use in cost-effective human vaccines. Building on successful demonstrations of higher-yield VLP production using its Daisy Petal™ Perfusion Bioreactor System, Sunflower will now focus on simplifying the recovery of VLPs, which remains the dominant cost driver in commercial-scale manufacturing.
“At Sunflower, our mission is to enable low-cost, next-generation vaccine manufacturing through continuous, automated bioprocessing,” said Laura Crowell, Director of R&D at Sunflower Therapeutics. “This grant allows us to advance a groundbreaking unit operation for continuous cell disruption, an essential step toward efficient and affordable VLP production. We are proud to strengthen the global vaccine ecosystem and ensure critical technologies are available where they are needed most.”
VLPs have proven to be highly effective vaccine platforms, eliciting strong immune responses and serving as the basis for licensed vaccines against hepatitis B, malaria, and human papillomavirus (HPV). However, conventional fed-batch production systems remain costly, limiting widespread access, particularly in the Global South. For example, HPV vaccines such as Gardasil-9 have an uptake of only about 41 percent among adolescent girls in Africa, where HPV prevalence is nearly twice as high as in other regions. By combining high space-time yields with streamlined recovery, Sunflower’s approach has the potential to reduce costs, expand access to life-saving vaccines, and enable decentralized production in smaller, more flexible facilities worldwide.
The research is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under award number R44AI191984. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
