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Engineering Online

BEC 577 Advanced Biomanufacturing and Biocatalysis

3 Credit Hours

(also offered as CHE 577)

Overview of biomanufacturing using microorganisms (bacteria, yeast, fungi), eukaryotic cells (insect, plant, CHO) and recombinant enzymes focusing on methods used in industry. Course will emphasize media and process design for optimization of heterologous protein expression, metabolic/cell line engineering, metabolomics, protein engineering to alter enzymes and antibodies. Pathway engineering strategies include developing microbes to produce new therapeutic compounds or overproduce primary metabolites, antibiotics, biotherapeutics, therapeutic enzymes, diagnostics, recombinant vaccines, and biopharmaceuticals. Utilization of immobilized biocatalysts, and microbial kinetics are covered.

Prerequisite

Graduate standing in engineering or life science graduate program or consent of instructor.  Previous coursework in microbiology, cell biology, microbial biochemistry or molecular biology will be helpful.

Learning Objectives

  1. Explain the scientific basis underlying the use of products relevant to advanced biomanufacturing, including antibody and antibody-like products, vaccines, and cell and gene therapies.
  2. Evaluate methods used in advanced biomanufacturing for production of therapeutic proteins, vaccines, cell and gene therapies, and other industrially relevant biochemicals. Identify methods and processes that are most suitable for a product.
  3. Evaluate the effect of intellectual property considerations and regulation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on development of products and biomanufacturing strategy.

Course Requirements

Participation on message board – 5%

Homework (10 x 1.5) 15%

Exams (4 x 15) 60%

Written paper and oral/poster presentation (20%)

Course Content and Structure

This course is organized into four modules that focus on important classes of products that are relevant to advanced biomanufacturing. The modules are:

  1. Antibodies and antibody-like proteins
  2. Vaccines
  3. Cell and gene therapies
  4. Other biochemicals (focus is on biocatalysis and microbial engineering)

 In each module, we will examine various aspects of biomanufacturing that are relevant to that class of product such as choice of recombinant host for protein expression and role of intellectual property and FDA regulation.

Textbook

There is no textbook required for this course. All course resources will be available on the course Moodle site.

Updated 11/04/2022