ATCC, a biological materials management and standards organization with research and technology centers in Gaithersburg and Germantown, Wednesday received a C06 Research Facilities Construction Grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build a new biomanufacturing suite at its headquarters in Manassas, Virginia.

Terms of the grant were not disclosed.

The company broke ground on the new facility project Sept. 12, which will be designed to rapidly respond to infectious disease outbreaks by providing high-throughput manufacturing for reproducible virus stocks and reagents to the NIH. The biomedical scientific community will broadly use these materials to accelerate and evaluate vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for public health, including those of epidemic or pandemic potential.

The goal of this funding is to include the design, construction and commissioning of a modern biomanufacturing suite, which will provide critical biological manufacturing capabilities in the biomedical space to accelerate translational research for vaccine and therapeutic development and serve as biological standards for developing detection assays. The facility will be able to offer large-scale stocks of well-characterized biomaterials at no cost to the research community.