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Who shrank the drug factory? Briefcase-sized labs could transform medicine

Engineers are miniaturizing pharmaceutical production in the hope of making it portable and inexpensive.
  1. Carrie Arnold

    1. Carrie Arnold is a science journalist based outside of Richmond, Virginia.

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Govind Rao demonstrating the, Biologically-derived Medicines on Demand (Bio-MOD system)

Credit: Rosem Morton for Nature

Govind Rao greets visitors to his lab just outside Baltimore with two things: a warm handshake and a chart. Almost before introductions are complete, Rao ushers guests into his windowless office at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and pulls up a graph on his battered laptop. On it, a steeply sloping line charts health spending in the United States over the past 40 years.

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Nature 575, 274-277 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03455-x

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 29 November 2019: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that an MIT project to produce biologic drugs was led by Timothy Lu. In fact, the project was led by Christopher Love with input from Lu. The article neglected to mention that this team was able to create drugs comparable to FDA-approved drugs and cite the appropriate reference. Finally, the cost estimate for medicine-on-demand systems was ambiguous.

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