HHS Backs Capra Biosciences with $17M to Onshore Essential API Production

Americans take Tylenol more than 25 billion times a year. About 60 million people reach for it in any given week. It's one of the most-used medicines in the country. But the active ingredient inside it, called an API, doesn't come from here. China makes roughly 70% of the acetaminophen the U.S. imports.

A Virginia startup wants to change that. Capra Biosciences, led by CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Onderko, just won an expanded $17 million award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Industrial Base Management and Supply Chain (IBMSC) part of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). The money will help Capra build domestic manufacturing for acetaminophen and six other essential APIs. It's part of a growing federal push to bring drug production back to American soil.

Capra is doing more than just on-shoring manufacturing, though. It's implementing a new way to make APIs in the first place.

“This award is exciting because it enables a fundamentally faster way to build domestic manufacturing for essential medicines using biotechnology. Through our partnership with USP, we will also be rapidly scaling the quality systems necessary to enable commercial production of 7 APIs here in the US.”

— Andrew Magyar, Capra's co-founder and CTO

A DIFFERENT WAY TO SCALE

China dominates drug manufacturing today by building bigger and bigger factories, each one built to make a single product. Need more output? Build a bigger tank. That approach takes years to validate and a fortune to change, and it's a race China has largely already won on cost and scale. Capra isn't trying to win that race. It's trying to change what the race looks like.

Instead of scaling up, Capra scales out, or as Onderko put it, “numbers up.” Rather than building one enormous tank for a single product, Capra runs many identical, smaller reactor units side by side, and adds more of them as demand grows. Each unit runs continuously rather than in batches, and the process Capra develops on the lab bench carries over unchanged to full production. That predictability is the whole point: a process that works in a small tank often behaves differently once it's scaled into a massive one, which is part of why traditional scale-up is so hard to plan for and so expensive to get wrong. Capra also builds purification directly into each reactor at the earliest stage, streamlining a step Magyar said often can be 50% or more of the overall cost to produce an ingredient.

In practice, that means Capra isn't locked into one facility making one drug, and the design opens the door to something bigger: distributed manufacturing. Instead of one massive facility, this reactor system could someday be built in smaller batches, at multiple sites, closer to where the drugs are actually needed.

“Our modular facilities can make multiple products and be replicated in different regions. That allows us to add production where it is needed, respond more quickly to shortages and build resilience without relying on a handful of massive, single-product plants.”

— Liz Onderko

Leveraging Capra's proprietary microbes, the same reactors can run on glucose, on glycerol, or on co-products from ethanol production and still produce the same target product, something traditional chemical manufacturing isn't built to do. Capra has already proven the approach works: both aspirin and acetaminophen have been made at pilot scale inside its own facility, meeting official U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP) guidelines, in under two years. That's a fast pace by industry standards, one Capra credits partly to a multi-year AI partnership with A-Life, part of Google X, which the company has used to speed up strain design and process development. This year's expanded HHS award is itself a vote of confidence: as Magyar put it, “the expanded award recognizes Capra's progress and the continued promise of our manufacturing platform” That money will help push five more APIs through the pipeline, bringing Capra's total to seven, out of a broader lineup of roughly 20 products.

NOT THE ONLY BET ON THE TABLE

The push to bring API manufacturing home has been building since COVID-19 exposed how thin America's drug stockpiles really were. An estimated 40% of U.S. generic drugs have just one FDA-approved manufacturer. In September 2023, ASPR's BARDA launched BioMaP-Consortium, a program that can invest up to $20 billion over 10 years to rebuild domestic bio-manufacturing. Capra is just one of the approaches its funding, and the amounts involved show how much money is already moving.

Antheia, based in Menlo Park, won its first BioMaP award the same month Capra did: $11 million in July 2024. A second agreement worth up to $12 million followed that December, later expanded by $9 million, bringing its combined federal backing to around $32 million. Its bet: engineering yeast that can make complex opioid ingredients, like thebaine, in a single fermentation step, replacing a supply chain that currently runs through poppy fields overseas.

Manus Bio, near Boston, landed $32.4 million in November 2024, the largest single BioMaP award to date, followed by $15 million more in early 2026, for a total of $47.4 million. Its bet is breadth: a library of microbes that can access more than 150,000 natural products, paired with a flow-chemistry partner, aimed at complex drugs like the antimalarial artemisinin and a key Tamiflu ingredient.

National Resilience, in San Diego, received nearly $17.5 million in October 2024. Rather than building new reactor hardware, it's repurposing manufacturing capacity it already owns and teaming up with a partner that makes lab-grown amino acids.

The API Innovation Center, a nonprofit in St. Louis, received $14 million in September 2024 and has since expanded its work with ASPR. Unlike the others, it isn't betting on one technology at all. It funds different small companies to tackle individual drugs, like propofol and albuterol, one at a time.

Capra's own award traces back to July 2024, when it first received $7.5 million under BioMaP, alongside Antheia's initial round. This year's expansion brings that total to $17 million, smaller than what Manus or Antheia have collected, but built on an approach none of the others are using. Instead of engineering one organism to make one hard-to-produce molecule, Capra built a flexible manufacturing system that can be pointed at many different molecules without redesigning the hardware each time. The bet is that the real bottleneck to on-shoring isn't the biology. It's the factory.

FROM TILE WAREHOUSE TO GMP FACILITY

Capra's facility sits five minutes from Dulles Airport, in a building that used to be a tile and carpet warehouse and showroom. The company moved in about two years ago and was operating within the first three months. GMP operations, the strict standard required for drug production, are on track to begin later this year. “We've only been here for two years,” Magyar said. “It feels like longer, but time flies in the startup world.”

Regulatory filings for Capra's API lineup should wrap up within about a year. After that, the company plans to build a second, larger facility, targeting roughly 1,000 metric tons of annual capacity. This scale would let Capra meaningfully supply solid dosage form markets for aspirin or acetaminophen.

Beyond pharma, Capra already has commercial traction. Their salicylic acid, a precursor of aspirin, is now sold into the personal care market, where “bio-based” is a real selling point. Pharmaceutical customers care about something else entirely: transparency and supply security. The FDA won't let a drug company market something as “natural,” since that counts as a medical claim. What actually matters to Capra's API customers, Magyar said, is knowing exactly what's happening inside a domestic, inspectable facility, and being able to trust where it comes from.

WHAT'S NEXT

Capra wants to grow its customer base among companies that make finished drug products. It's also open to working with partners who want to use its platform for entirely new products. Longer term, the company is working toward what Magyar calls “lights-out manufacturing,” facilities that run with very little human involvement, powered by the same AI and automation tools behind its scale-up work.

“Biotechnology allows us to make critical ingredients from broadly available feedstocks, without recreating every link in a long petrochemical supply chain. It makes domestic production practical in cases where traditional chemistry simply cannot.”

— Liz Onderko