The Ohio biotechnology firm Optimvia Pharmaceuticals says it has developed a cost-effective synthetic method to produce large quantities of heparin, which is used to make a common blood thinner. And last week the company struck a deal with the synthetic biology firm Ginkgo Bioworks to scale the process up.
Most of the world’s heparin comes from the mucus of pig intestines, largely processed at factories in China. A contamination incident in 2007 and 2008 that killed hundreds of people raised concerns about the drug’s quality. After a 2019 swine flu outbreak killed millions of pigs in China, US lawmakers questioned the reliability of a supply chain that depends on a single species of livestock.
Those concerns have sparked interest in a synthetic version of heparin. Sanofi and Organon launched a synthetic heparin called fondaparinux in the US in 2001. But it accounts for only a small share of the market because it’s more expensive and has some clinical drawbacks. Academic researchers have created syntheticheparins that avoid some of those drawbacks, but they haven’t been commercialized yet.
