enGenes teams with Sweetgrass Bio to address North American biologics

Vienna, Austria: – End-to-end bioprocessing specialist CDMO enGenes Biotech is deepening its relationship with North America’s biotech community through its new partnership with the Sweetgrass Bio consultancy.

Sweetgrass Bio, led by Dr. Christy Franco, is a Texas-based consultancy that specializes in working with advanced therapies organizations, CDMOs, and platform technology companies to align manufacturing, quality, and regulatory realities with commercial strategy and execution.

Boosting Manufacturing Readiness

Sweetgrass consulting services are grounded in deep, hands-on experience across the biologics value chain, with Christy Franco’s expertise grounded in her PhD in Bioengineering from Rice University and deep domain expertise across the plasmid DNA value chain.

The collaboration with enGenes and its industry-leading proprietary microbial expression platforms will boost the core Sweetgrass Bio offer of Manufacturing Readiness & Commercial Alignment, taking in capability gap assessments, quality systems, and tech transfer.

Higher production, lower cost

enGenes CEO Dr. Jürgen Mairhofer commented: “One trend we continue to see across the biotechnology sector is the growing pressure to maximize production output at lower costs. On both sides of the Atlantic, biotech and biopharma companies, advanced therapy developers, industrial biotechnology innovators, and CDMOs alike are looking for ways to accelerate development timelines, improve process economics, and overcome manufacturing challenges earlier in development.”

“Now Sweetgrass Bio will be able to connect their clients with enGenes expertise in helping organizations overcome bottlenecks in recombinant protein and plasmid DNA production through advanced E. coli expression technologies, strain engineering, and process development expertise, particularly for organizations working to optimize their product development before scaling to GMP manufacturing.”

Supporting innovation

“With their extensive experience in advanced therapies and deep connections across the US biotechnology ecosystem, Sweetgrass Bio and Christy will help make it easier for organizations to access our advanced solutions for upstream development and expression challenges in recombinant protein and plasmid DNA programs,” Dr. Mairhofer explained.

“Together, we can support more innovators as they move from development challenges to scalable manufacturing solutions,” he added.

About enGenes Biotech

With more than a decade of proven expertise, enGenes Biotech develops bioprocesses that consistently outperform conventional approaches. The company’s proprietary technology platforms deliver higher yields, faster timelines, and superior scalability for recombinant proteins, peptides and plasmid DNA production in E. coli. These directly translate into reduced production costs and accelerated market entry. From early concept to industrial process, they enable pharmaceutical, diagnostic and industrial applications to achieve results that set new industry benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

enGenes Biotech’s expertise spans every step of the biomanufacturing lifecycle: molecular biology, upstream and downstream processing, analytics, process scale-up, product development, and market entry. It can deliver tailored solutions that reduce costs, advance sustainable innovation, and improve customers’ competitive position in the global marketplace.

The company offers development and manufacturing services for recombinant proteins, peptides, and plasmid DNA tailored to the needs of pharmaceutical and industrial biotech companies. Their integrated service portfolio ensures efficiency, quality, and speed in tackling even the toughest challenges. In addition, they are building a portfolio of high-quality and cost-effective products, with an initial focus on endonucleases and protein A-based affinity ligands.

Find out more at: https://www.engenes.cc

About Sweetgrass Bio

Founded in 2025, Sweetgrass Bio is a strategic bioengineering consultancy that specializes in providing direction and propelling growth for biotech innovators and service providers through strategic insight and focused commercial execution.

Sweetgrass Bio supports three types of teams:

• Therapy developers preparing for CDMO selection or manufacturing scale-up.
• CDMOs sharpening positioning, BD systems, and customer engagement.
• Platform companies translating technical capability into commercial traction.

Led by CEO Christy Franco, PhD, Sweetgrass provides services spanning the entire biologic value chain, from Market Strategy, through Manufacturing Readiness, to building out Commercial Infrastructure.

Learn more at: https://sweetgrassbio.com

Resources

Visit enGenes Media Center for latest news and developments.
Click on enGenes Biotech Technologies to learn more about advanced expression platforms.