Manus Bio’s first biotech manufacturing facility in Augusta, Georgia – a 44-acre fermentation and ingredient processing plant – is ready to start producing ingredients for flavors and fragrances, sweeteners, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural chemicals, as the company updated the former NutraSweet artificial sweetener plant, which had been idled since 2015.

So far, the Company has hired 30 full-time employees and more than 70 contractors. Among the company’s first products will be a next-generation Stevia sweetener, which delivers natural, zero-calorie sweetness without the limitations of earlier versions of Stevia.

The next steps for the Augusta facility include scaling up additional products in Manus Bio’s pipeline, which are currently under development in its Cambridge-based R&D facility. Recommissioning of the Augusta facility to accommodate another 1.2 million liters of fermentation capacity will begin next year.

Manus Bio recreates natural plant processes in microbes using its proprietary commercial strain development platform, which is rooted in modular and data-driven design paired with semi-combinatorial optimization. Manus Bio merges three proprietary technologies – Multivariate Modular Metabolic Engineering (MMME), Pathway Integrated Protein Engineering (PIPE), and Integrated Multivariate Omics Analysis (IMOA) – in order to quickly and efficiently generate microbes that produce a variety of plant-based ingredients.

Last year, the company received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the development of a scalable and cost-effective production method for artemisinin, a key therapeutic ingredient for treating malaria. The company will use its proprietary microbial chassis and enzyme engineering approaches to develop an advanced fermentation process for low-cost manufacturing of artemisinin.